bash: shortest way to get n-th column of output

Question

Let\'s say that during your workday you repeatedly encounter the following form of columnized output from some command in bash (in my case from executing svn st

Answer 1

I found myself in the same situation and ended up adding these aliases to my .profile file:

alias c1="awk '{print \$1}'"
alias c2="awk '{print \$2}'"
alias c3="awk '{print \$3}'"
alias c4="awk '{print \$4}'"
alias c5="awk '{print \$5}'"
alias c6="awk '{print \$6}'"
alias c7="awk '{print \$7}'"
alias c8="awk '{print \$8}'"
alias c9="awk '{print \$9}'"

Which allows me to write things like this:

svn st | c2 | xargs rm