cut command??? 1

[mwesticle]

Hi...
I have a tab delimited file that has three fields. It looks like this:

1111 14A 1111
2222 7C 2222
3333 11B 3333
4444 99X 4444

I need to write a command that will "cut" three bytes from the second field (cutting spaces if there is no data in the third byte), outputting them to newfile.
I've tried, &quot;cut -f2 <infile> > <outfile>&quot;, and that works, except it doesn't take three bytes from the second field containing '7C'. In other words, it cuts '7C', instead of '7C '. Know what I mean???
Once again, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[smythe]

Have you tried looking up possibilties using sed or awk?

 

[vgersh99]

nawk '{printf(&quot;[%-3s]\n&quot;, $2);}' myFile.txt

vlad
+----------------------------+
| #include<disclaimer.h> |
+----------------------------+

 

[vgersh99]

or something like that with sed:

sed -e 's/^\([^ ][^ ]*\)[ ][ ]*\(...\).*/[\2]/g' myFile.txt

vlad
+----------------------------+
| #include<disclaimer.h> |
+----------------------------+