Practical, hands-on tips to extract fields and fixed-width columns quickly with the cut command. 16.11.2025 | reading time: 2 min Want to pull the second column from a CSV or trim fixed-width fields quickly? The `cut` command extracts fields, bytes or character ranges from each input line so he can slice columns without opening a spreadsheet. Quick CSV slice Example: given file.csv with these lines separated by semicolons for readability: name,age,city;Alice,30,Berlin;Bob,25,Paris — run `cut -d',' -f1,3 file.csv` and you get: name,city;Alice,Berlin;Bob,Paris. Powerful options to know Use `-d` to set a delimiter and `-f` to select fields; use `-c` to select character ranges and `-b` for byte positions; `--complement` returns all fields except those listed; remember cut is line-oriented and will not correctly parse quoted CSV fields or nested delimiters. When cut reaches its limits For robust parsing choose `awk` for field-aware scripts, `csvkit` for quoted CSV handling, or `sed` and `tr` for pre- and post-processing; combine tools in pipelines to trim, reformat and join columns without loading large files into memory. Next practical steps Master cut for quick, ad-hoc column extraction and then practice piping it with other utilities to build fast workflows; if he wants deeper Linux expertise consider formal study toward CompTIA Linux+ or LPIC-1, and try intensive exam preparation at bitsandbytes.academy. Join Bits & Bytes Academy First class LINUX exam preparation. utilities scripting filesystem troubleshooting
