[xthetrfd]

I can't understand why you are mentioning awk. Cut or choose cannot be compared to awk, awk is a programming language.

Also I don't think that it's so much easier to use than cut. On the other hand every *nix system has cut so if you make scripts with it they are portable.

[BiteCode_dev]

> I can't understand why you are mentioning awk. Cut or choose cannot be compared to awk, awk is a programming language.

Because 99% of awk IRL use is just as a fancier cut.

It's very rare someone even sets a variable using awk. If you do it, you are a statistical rarity.

> Also I don't think that it's so much easier to use than cut. On the other hand every *nix system has cut so if you make scripts with it they are portable.

I, for one, never remember the syntax for cut. If "choose" gets a deb, I'll use it: Python slicing is something familiar to me.

I don't care if cut is on every unix system: if I have the possibility to install things on the machine, then I'll just install what I need. I have a script for that. If I don't, I'll google/man/--help GNU commands as usual.

And as for writing shell scripts, I use Python anyway.

[masklinn]

> Because 99% of awk IRL use is just a as fancier cut.

You say "fancier", I say "working": since cut can't work on general whitespace without a pre-processing phase (e.g. tr), it simply doesn't work for the vast majority of the things I try to shove into it, and I pretty much always end up using awk instead.

Choose means my awk use will fall down by 99% or so.

[BiteCode_dev]

Agreed.

In fact, anybody promoting cut, please give me the cut version of:

    echo -e "foo   bar   baz" | choose -1 -2

It should work on an arbitrary number of spaces, and fields.

The oneliner is going to be... interesting.

Now you can do it with awk using:

   echo -e "foo bar baz" | awk '{ print $NF " " $(NF-1)}'

But it's neither easy to type, nor to remember.

Choose is what cut should have been.

[errnoh]

By using only basic functionality that's easy enough to remember I guess I'd go with something like

`echo -e "foo bar baz" | tr -s ' ' | rev | cut -d ' ' -f 1-2 | rev | awk '{print $2 " " $1}`

Everything except the awk part is something that I use all the time and is easy to type & remember.

To be honest I'd use `choose` if it was available everywhere, but for string manipulation I can't justify using nonstandard tools since they aren't always available.

Every now and then there are some new ones I actually start to use. For example `ripgrep` mostly replaced `grep -R` for me some time ago, a lot of it has to do with the fact that if `rg` is not found I can fallback to normal grep and get the same result, just a bit slower.

I guess my point is that while I do appreciate innovation & making better tooling, the hard part always is getting the tool where it's most needed.

[Brian_K_White]

cut? I don't even leave the shell.

echo ... |while read a b x ;do ... ;done

[darrenf]

For what it's worth, BSD cut has a `-w` flag for separating on general whitespace.

[masklinn]

> BSD cut

Only FreeBSD, and it's somewhat recent (it was apparently added in 2012, in 9.2, so it's not in osx either).

[Legogris]

> regular expression field separators using Rust's regex syntax

This actually makes choose a cut-killer for me. It can be frustrating having to figure out which delimiters to use - tabs or spaces? If spaces, you'll have to chain it with tr, or resort to awk.

[BiteCode_dev]

And choose makes it even better by using "\s" as a default separator. So you usually don't have to specify a separator at all.