Tuesday, May 25, 2010

About selecting a number of columns from a Text file

Today I had an interesting issue. I received a really big file with lots of columns in it. I only needed a few of them though, so I set out to write a quick Perl script to do the job, but then I thought to myself: "I'd better Google before I do this since it seems like a common enough problem.". Of course someone had already written a program like that. It's called cut and can be used from your terminal. I needed columns 1 to 22 from the file so I just issued
cut -f 1-22 myfile.txt > mynewfile.txt
This made the file "mynewfile.txt" contain columns 1 to 22. You can also specify what kind of separator you want. If you don't choose any the program will assume TAB as the field separator.

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