Linux Admin – cut Command

Linux Admin - cut Command

This topic is about Linux Admin – cut Command.

cut and grep are two of the most useful and common commands for a CentOS Administrator. cut is extremely useful for dealing with delimited files such as Linux configuration files, Linux preference files, and CSV files.

SwitchAction
-bSelect only these bytes
-cSelect only these characters
-dUse DELIM instead of TAB for field delimiter
-sOnly print delimited lines

Most times, cut will be used to extract specific rows out of text files. Previously, we have used cut to get a listing of all users from /etc/passwd −

[root@centosLocal centos]# cut -d":" -f1 /etc/passwd  
root 
bin 
daemon 
adm 
lp 
sync
shutdown

Above is a digested list of system users from /etc/passwd.

Some Linux utilities and applications actually save the output with the functionality of cut in mind. Following is an example of nmap output.

[root@centosLocal centos]# grep open ./http_scans.txt  
Host: 10.58.52.67 ()   Ports: 80/open/tcp//http/// 
Host: 10.58.52.132 ()  Ports: 80/open/tcp//http/// 
Host: 10.58.52.133 ()  Ports: 80/open/tcp//http/// 
Host: 10.58.52.56 ()   Ports: 80/open/tcp//http/// 
Host: 10.58.52.71 ()   Ports: 80/open/tcp//http/// 
Host: 10.58.52.132 ()  Ports: 80/open/tcp//http///

With cut, we can quickly generate a list of internal systems with port 80 listening for outside requests.

[root@centosLocal centos]# grep open ./http_scans.txt | cut -d" " -f2 >
open_http_servers.txt  
[root@centosLocal centos]# head open_http_servers.txt  
10.58.52.17 
10.58.52.29 
10.58.52.30 
10.58.52.36 
10.58.52.59 
10.58.53.89 
10.58.53.100 
10.58.54.103 
10.58.54.148 
10.58.54.152

[root@centosLocal centos]#

Cut can also be used by character count.

[root@centosLocal centos]# cut -c 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 lanIP-range.txt  
10.58.52 
10.58.52 
10.58.52 
10.58.52 
10.58.52 
10.58.52
10.58.53 
10.58.53 
10.58.53 
10.58.53 
10.58.53 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54 
10.58.54

[root@centosLocal centos]#

cut is a command that will be used almost daily by a CentOS Administrator. It is a life saver for parsing text and some binary files.

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