Cut a column in bash

Problem

You have a line of text and you want to extract a given column.

Solution

Use awk for instance. Indexing starts with 1. Example:

C:~> date
Sun Mar 20 12:16:17 EDT 2011
C:~> date | awk '{print $2}'
Mar
C:~>

Of course, we could have written “date '+%b'” in this case, but I wanted to show how to cut a column.