How to get the second column from command output?

Question

My command\'s output is something like:

1540 \"A B\"
   6 \"C\"
 119 \"D\"

The first column is always a number, followed by a space, then a

Answer 1

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys 

col = int(sys.argv[1]) - 1

for line in sys.stdin:
    columns = line.split()

    try:
        print(columns[col])
    except IndexError:
        # ignore
        pass

Then, supposing you name the script as co, say, do something like this to get the sizes of files (the example assumes you're using Linux, but the script itself is OS-independent) :-

ls -lh | co 5