FInger and cut (sounds painful doesn't it) 1

[GirlInTrouble]

Hi there you guys ;-)

Im trying to get the first 3 fields from a finger -s command
I've tried using cut but that doesn't work.

who |cut -d" " -f1|xargs finger -s|cut -d" " -f1,2,3

The output of finger is seperated with multiple spaces. Do I used IFS again? How do I say my delimiter is junk? I tried -s on cut - no use though. I also tried pr (from last time ;-) )
Any ideas boys?

Thanks

 

[toolkit]

Umm, or something similar

 

[GirlInTrouble]

;-) I was holding off trying to learn perl until I was proficient at shell! (BTW it looks scary!) Are you saying its easier to do it in perl or impossible to do it in ksh?
I figured something in awk might do it don't you think?
I had a really good photocopy from an old sco manual about awk. Lost it though, might be worth trying to dig out. This is an exercise in learning, so hey if you think I might be able to do it in awk don't tell me yet...
I WILL try your idea, just out of curiosity though.
Thanks toolkit

 

[nawlej]

Its a lot easier to do it in perl. Perl's pattern matching and split functions alike are second to none.