Philip Ganchev wrote: > functionality very often when working with tabular data. Currently, > the expression to achieve this is clumsy: > > cut -f 3,5-$(echo $(head -1 myfile | wc -w) - 3 | bc) myfile
You're right, that's very clumsy, especially the "head -1" part which is problematic. (You should use the unambiguous "head -n 1" instead.) > The new syntax could use +1 to specify the last column, +2 to specify > the second-last, etc. This syntax is the same as for the "tail" > command. Then you can achieve the same as the above expression by > writing: > > cut -f 3,5-+3 myfile How about: perl -F'\t' -nae 'print join "\t", @F[2,4..$#F-3]' myfile Brian _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
