Scripting: Using cut to Capture Information

In the previous article we discussed using grep and awk to harvest information.  The final example in that article may have left us wanting.  In this article, we’ll discuss some additional options that the cut command can give us.

As we discussed, the following command:

diskutil info / | grep "Volume Name:" | awk '{print $3}'

would output the name of our boot volume, assuming there were no spaces in it.  However, if our target Mac had a factory standard boot volume called “Macintosh HD”, we’d need to change our command to:

diskutil info / | grep "Volume Name:" | awk '{print $3,$4}'

If there were more than one space in our volume names, well, it all becomes a bit much to manage. Unfortunately, awk doesn’t provide a method to display word X and all following words, so we will look to another command called cut.

According to its man page, cut is designed to “cut out selected portions of each line of a file”.  Cut can work with “words”, like awk, or it can work with characters.  We’ll look at working with words first.  Unless specified otherwise, cut assumes that words are delimited (separated) by tab characters.  If the delimiter is something other than a tab, the delimiter must be defined using the “-d” option.  After defining the delimiter, we must tell cut which words we would like to output.  We do this using the -f option, followed by a number indicating the word’s position.  Unlike awk, we do not need a “$” or other character to indicate our word selection, just the number.  Also unlike awk, we can specify a range, including “X-” which tells cut to return the word at position X and everything after it, which we will do below.

diskutil info / | grep "Volume Name:" | cut -d ' ' -f 19-

The “-d” option has indicated that our delimiter is a space.  The “-f” option has asked for words 19 through the end of the line.  This may seem a bit confusing because if you look at the output of the first two commands, it would seem that we would be interested in word number 3 and onward.  It would appear that diskutil’s output contains both spaces and tabs, and a bit of trial and error helped to arrive at the number 19.  This command will return our boot volume’s name regardless of the number of spaces in the name.

The other option when working with cut is to simply count characters.  This precludes a need to define a delimiter.  By counting characters, we can find the same information with the following command:

diskutil info / | grep “Volume Name:” | cut -c 30-

This line will return character number 30 and all characters that follow it.  Like the example using the -d and -f options, this will return our boot volume’s name regardless of the number of spaces in the name.

We see that cut can provide us with some capabilities that awk doesn’t.  Hopefully this examination will help you to capture data in your own scripts.

The commands in this article have been tested on Mac OS X versions 10.5.8 and 10.6.7 (build 10J869).  Thanks go to Lisa at lisacherie.com for assistance in testing the commands used in this article.