Pádraig,
I'm actually interested in whitespace blocks, rather than just runs of
spaces, but I see that this was also discussed at the link. I suppose
from a typability and readability standpoint I still prefer 'awk' to
the alternative
$ tr '[:blank:]' ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 3-5
although I'd still love to see the mooted
$ cut -w 3-5
since this seems like such a frequent CL use case.
More than that, I'm intrigued by the rationale for this decision.
While I can appreciate conservatism on things like this, it's
difficult to imagine any change other than i18n or bugfixes that would
pass this criterion. And if changes are locked out, I wonder if
coreutils/etc will ultimately ossify into one of those relics I
remember wondering about when I got started in the 80s...
Thank you for the link and the insight!
Mike
P.S. +1 for the domain name... :-)
2009/9/9 Pádraig Brady <p...@draigbrady.com>:
> Mike Coleman wrote:
>> It would be really nice if cut(1) could split fields using whitespace
>> as a separator (as many other text tools do). Currently I use
>>
>> $ awk '{ print $3, $4, $5 }'
>>
>> for this sort of thing, but it seems relatively klutzy, as opposed to (say)
>>
>> $ cut -w -f 3-5
>
> That was discussed a while ago:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-05/msg00153.html
>
> In summary the existing `tr -s '[:blank:]' | cut -d ' '`
> was (marginally) deemed sufficient rather than supporting
> cut -d '[:blank:]'
>
> cheers,
> Pádraig.
>
