Split output of command by columns using Bash?

Question

I want to do this:

1. run a command
2. capture the output
3. select a line
4. select a column of that line

Just as an example, l

Answer 1

Similar to brianegge's awk solution, here is the Perl equivalent:

ps | egrep 11383 | perl -lane 'print $F[3]'

-a enables autosplit mode, which populates the @F array with the column data.
Use -F, if your data is comma-delimited, rather than space-delimited.

Field 3 is printed since Perl starts counting from 0 rather than 1