Linux Cut command

Cut Command
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Divide a file into several parts (columns)

syntax:
cut [-b] [-c] [-f] list [-n] [-d delim] [-s] [file]

Examples:
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1. Let say you have a file test.txt which has colon(:) seperated data

406378:Sales:Itorre:Jan
031762:Marketing:Nasium:Jim
636496:Research:Ancholie:Mel
396082:Sales:Jucacion:Ed

If you want to print first set of data from each row, you can use cut command as follow:

cut -d":" -f1 test.txt

If you want to print just columns 1 to 6 of each line (the employee serial numbers), use the -c1-6 flag, as in this command

cut -c1-6 test.txt