cut

Suppress lines with no delimiter characters, when used with the -f option. Unless specified, lines with no delimiters shall be passed through untouched. The input files shall be text files, except that line lengths shall be unlimited. Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See XBD Internationalization Variables for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.) If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables. Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments and input files). Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error. [XSI) ] ![[Option Start]]( Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC MESSAGES. ![[Option End]]( The cut and fold utilities can be used to create text files out of files with arbitrary line lengths. The cut utility should be used when the number of lines (or records) needs to remain constant. The fold utility should be used when the contents of long lines need to be kept contiguous. Select the first, fourth, and seventh bytes, characters, or fields and field delimiters. The low - high forms are not always equivalent when used with -b and -n and multi-byte characters; see the description of -n . Most utilities in this volume of POSIX.1-2017 work on text files. The cut utility can be used to turn files with arbitrary line lengths into a set of text files containing the same data. The paste utility can be used to create (or recreate) files with arbitrary line lengths. For example, if file contains long lines: creates file1 (a text file) with lines no longer than 500 bytes (plus the ) and file2 that contains the remainder of the data from file . (Note that file2 is not a text file if there are lines in file that are longer than 500 + {LINE MAX} bytes.) The original file can be recreated from file1 and file2 using the command: Some historical implementations do not count characters in determining character counts with the -c option. This may be useful for using cut for processing nroff output. It was deliberately decided not to have the -c option treat either or characters in any special fashion. The fold utility does treat these characters specially. Unlike other utilities, some historical implementations of cut exit after not finding an input file, rather than continuing to process the remaining file operands. This behavior is prohibited by this volume of POSIX.1-2017, where only the exit status is affected by this problem. The behavior of cut when provided with either mutually-exclusive options or options that do not work logically together has been deliberately left unspecified in favor of global wording in Utility Description Defaults . The OPTIONS section was changed in response to IEEE PASC Interpretation 1003.2 149. The change represents historical practice on all known systems. The original standard was ambiguous on the nature of the output. The list option-arguments are historically used to select the portions of the line to be written, but do not affect the order of the data. For example: Preserve the selected field order. When this option is specified, each byte, character, or field (or ranges of such) shall be written in the order specified by the list option-argument, even if this requires multiple outputs of the same bytes, characters, or fields. was rejected because this type of enhancement is outside the scope of the IEEE P1003.2b draft standard. The OPTIONS section is changed to align with the IEEE P1003.2b draft standard. The normative text is reworded to avoid use of the term "must" for application requirements.