Question

I’ve got strange problem with cut
I wrote script, there I have row:

... | cut -d" " -f3,4 >! out

cut recieves this data (I checked it with echo)

   James             James              033333333 0              0.00

but I recieve empty lines in out, can somebody explain why?

Answer 1

You need to compress out the sequences of spaces, so that each string of spaces is replaced by a single space. The tr command’s -s (squeeze) option is perfect for this:

$ ... | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f3,4 >! out