How can I get 2nd and third column in tab delim file in bash?

Question

I want to use bash to process a tab delimited file. I only need the second column and third to a new file.

Answer 1

expanding on the answer of carl-norum, using only tab as a delimiter, not all blanks:

cut -d$'\t' -f 2-3 input.txt > output.txt

don't put a space between d and $

Answer 2

cut(1) was made expressly for this purpose:

cut -f 2-3 input.txt > output.txt

Answer 3

Cut is probably the best choice here, second to that is awk

awk -F"\t" '{print $2 "\t" $3}' input > out