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

Try the zsh. It supports suffix alias, so you can define X in your .zshrc to be

alias -g X="| cut -d' ' -f2"

then you can do:

cat file X

You can take it one step further and define it for the nth column:

alias -g X2="| cut -d' ' -f2"
alias -g X1="| cut -d' ' -f1"
alias -g X3="| cut -d' ' -f3"

which will output the nth column of file "file". You can do this for grep output or less output, too. This is very handy and a killer feature of the zsh.

You can go one step further and define D to be:

alias -g D="|xargs rm"

Now you can type:

cat file X1 D

to delete all files mentioned in the first column of file "file".

If you know the bash, the zsh is not much of a change except for some new features.

HTH Chris