[bitcraft]

This is great! I always felt like cut was really handicapped by lack of negative indexes.

[kseistrup]

The biggest handicap of cut for me has always been that it cannot split on blanks (TABs or SPACEs), you have to choose between TAB or SPACE. So I wrote an awk script that can print field ranges like cut, but recognizes blanks. Now I will see if I can get tuc worked into my muscle memory.

[layer8]

I usually just pipe through sed to normalize the separators before applying cut.

[kseistrup]

That's also a little awkward, when there could easily be an option to split by all blanks.

[layer8]

I’m not defending cut here, but using sed is also pretty straightforward and fits its purpose. I’d argue that using the existing general-purpose tools is better than creating custom narrow-purpose tools in simple cases like this one. Besides maintainability and familiarity, it also exercises your proficiency in applying the standard tools.

[kseistrup]

You have a point, of course.

[tyingq]

awk can do something like negative indexes if needed:

  $ echo "a b c" | awk '{print $(NF-1)}'
  b

[samwhiteUK]

When I want to use negative indices, I pipe the string through rev first, then do my cut, then rev again

[mprovost]

That's the classic solution but blows up when using multibyte characters since rev just reads the bytes in each line in reverse.

[pimlottc]

What do you mean by negative indexes?

[ratrocket]

I believe "negative index" means array[-1] is the last element in array, array[-2] is the second-to-last element, etc.

In the context of "cut", it would mean being able to do something like:

cut -d" " -f1--2

the "-f1--2" (read: fields from 1 to minus 2; it's a range) means to select from the first field to the second-to-last field. (that double "--" is pretty awkward, to be sure!)

Some programming languages (ruby is the one that I know) have this feature for accessing array elements.