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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

I'm an expert on neither AWK nor cut, but AWK allows you to select a field, or the entire line, and then substrings within those.

Select characters 3-6 (inclusive) in the second field:

$ echo Testing LengthyString | awk '{print substr($2,3,4)}'

> ngth

If you want to select columns from the entire line, then:

$ echo Testing LengthyString | awk '{print substr($0,3,4)}'

> stin

Is that what you meant?

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I don't think so. I think they're referring to cut's ability to select an arbitrary range of columns, e.g. `cut -f 2-7` to select the 2nd through 7th columns, while awk requires you to explicitly enumerate all desired columns, i.e. `awk '{print $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7}'

> "while awk requires you to explicitly enumerate all desired columns"

Or you can use loops, e.g.,

  echo $(seq 100) | awk '{ for (i = 2; i <= 7; i++) { print $i; }; }'

It's more characters than manual way. There should be just a built-in function.

What cauthon said, cut lets you select range of fields with a simple option, awk doesn't, ex(csv line):

  cut -d, -f10-30

(selects from field 10 to 30)

Not saying this can't be written in awk with more code, but we were talking about field selection ergonomics.

OK, understood. And yes, in my experience AWK is less good at that, cut would definitely be the right tool.

It doesn't detract from the point at hand - which is perfectly valid - but it's worth noting that there's a confusion here with regards the terminology: "fields" vs "columns". I thought they were referring to "columns of characters" whereas the added explanations[0] are about "columns of fields". That makes a difference.

But as I say, yes, I agree that to select a range of columns of fields, especially several fields from each line, is definitely better with cut.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109551

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