Question

I have a file that has the format

string string string ...
string string string ...
...
string string string ...

I want to get another file, so that for each line, only the first string appears in that line (i.e. take only the part before the first whitespace of each line.)

How could I do that with commandline in Ubuntu?

Answer 1

I think you want this:

awk '{print $1}' < input.txt > output.txt