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Comment by cluckindan | Hacker News Reader

How is that different from

    echo '999 888' | cut -f2 -d " "

except for the default delimiter being space for awk?

   echo '999  888' | cut -f2 -d " " # notice two consecutive spaces

returns NULL.

Right, that would be expected though? I suppose awk is better for parsing formatted (padded) output.

There are invalid column separators for awk too. To handle consecutive spaces in cut you have squeeze them:

  echo '999  888' | tr -s " " | cut -f2 -d " "