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Comment by cauthon | Hacker News Reader

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}'

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> "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.

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