Take nth column in a text file

Question

I have a text file:

1 Q0 1657 1 19.6117 Exp
1 Q0 1410 2 18.8302 Exp
2 Q0 3078 1 18.6695 Exp
2 Q0 2434 2 14.0508 Exp
2 Q0 3129 3 13.5495 Exp

Answer 1

You can use the cut command:

cut -d' ' -f3,5 < datafile.txt

prints

1657 19.6117
1410 18.8302
3078 18.6695
2434 14.0508
3129 13.5495

the

• -d' ' - mean, use space as a delimiter
• -f3,5 - take and print 3rd and 5th column

The cut is much faster for large files as a pure shell solution. If your file is delimited with multiple whitespaces, you can remove them first, like:

sed 's/[\t ][\t ]*/ /g' < datafile.txt | cut -d' ' -f3,5

where the (gnu) sed will replace any tab or space characters with a single space.

For a variant - here is a perl solution too:

perl -lanE 'say "$F[2] $F[4]"' < datafile.txt