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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

Seems similar in intent to choose (https://github.com/theryangeary/choose) as a cut which doesn't suck. The features outlined are very close, I just don't understand what "can split text into lines" is, do you mean that the selected fields can be split into lines?

The main advantage of tuc seems to be "templated" outputs.

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> I just don't understand what "can split text into lines" is, do you mean that the selected fields can be split into lines?

Good question, I struggle to word it properly, any help is appreciated.

Assume a file (we will call it "input"), such as

   first line here
   followed by second line

You can use a delimiter and cut inside each line

e.g.

    $ tuc -d ' ' -f 2 < input
    line
    by

or you can cut it "by lines", practically considering the whole file as your single "line" and using newline as delimiter

    $ tuc -l -f 2 < input
    followed by second line

If you want to remove a line, or keep something inbetween it can be more practical/intuitive than head/tail or sed

This feature seems more like a replacement for head and tail (and combination of both) rather than cut.

Maybe a good way to explain it would be to show how to achieve the same thing with those well known commands (comparison which should certainly be in favor of tuc ^^)

EDIT: sorry you just said more or less the same thing, I need to read better :)

You could have it do "every 5th line". Easy with awk but this is more compact

Sed is terse for that, but not very memorable...sed -n '0~5p' filename

Good tip. Thanks.

Ref. your $ tuc -d ' ' -f 2 < input how is different from $ cut -d ' ' -f 2 input ?

> Ref. your $ tuc -d ' ' -f 2 < input how is different from $ cut -d ' ' -f 2 input ?

It's not. `tuc` is a superset of cut and in that particular example there's no difference. If you wanted instead to cut on multibyte delimiters, or on a random amount of spaces, `tuc` would work, while `cut` would fall short

I was responding in good faith to your response "Good question, I struggle to word it properly, any help is appreciated." You answered masklinn's with an implementation of your tool that `cut` would also do. That is what I was highlighting. I was not trying to belittle your utility, I have even installed it. But I also don't communicate perfectly so we'll call it evens?

Don't worry, I was in good faith too, it's hard to convey some things sometime. I tried to answer masklinn's question with a simple example, didn't really think about whether it would have showcased tuc or not.

Thanks for trying it out!

It's also very similar to my tool hck (https://github.com/sstadick/hck) which is in turn similar to choose, just faster, supports compression, and supports column selection via matching headers.

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