Something I came across recently was command line text manipulation with a CSV. The way that the list option is passed in is cool.

For demonstration purposed, we have a contrived text document “dummy.txt” that happens to be delimited by the % character. The contents inside the file are:

name%car%temp%color
john%honda%fair%blue
tom%benz%fair%red
ed%bmw%cold%green

To get the first column of data, you can run

cut -d% -f1 dummy.txt

which gives you:

name
john
tom
ed

If you wanted to save the output, the standard command line “>” comes in handy.

To get the columns up to (and including the) 2nd column, you can run

cut -d% -f-2 dummy.txt

which gives you:

name%car
john%honda
tom%benz
ed%bmw

To get the 2nd & 3rd columns, inclusive, you can run

cut -d% -f2-3 dummy.txt

which gives you:

car%temp
honda%fair
benz%fair
bmw%cold

To get the 3rd column onward to the last column, you can run

cut -d% -f3- dummy.txt

which gives you:

temp%color
fair%blue
fair%red
cold%green

The examples above are just for this demo, but I think the hyphen syntax in the list fields option is easy to learn and visually clear (for a CLI interface).