On: Show HN: Choose – An alternative to cut and someti...

[BiteCode_dev]

Agreed.

In fact, anybody promoting cut, please give me the cut version of:

    echo -e "foo   bar   baz" | choose -1 -2

It should work on an arbitrary number of spaces, and fields.

The oneliner is going to be... interesting.

Now you can do it with awk using:

   echo -e "foo bar baz" | awk '{ print $NF " " $(NF-1)}'

But it's neither easy to type, nor to remember.

Choose is what cut should have been.

[errnoh → BiteCode_dev]

By using only basic functionality that's easy enough to remember I guess I'd go with something like

`echo -e "foo bar baz" | tr -s ' ' | rev | cut -d ' ' -f 1-2 | rev | awk '{print $2 " " $1}`

Everything except the awk part is something that I use all the time and is easy to type & remember.

To be honest I'd use `choose` if it was available everywhere, but for string manipulation I can't justify using nonstandard tools since they aren't always available.

Every now and then there are some new ones I actually start to use. For example `ripgrep` mostly replaced `grep -R` for me some time ago, a lot of it has to do with the fact that if `rg` is not found I can fallback to normal grep and get the same result, just a bit slower.

I guess my point is that while I do appreciate innovation & making better tooling, the hard part always is getting the tool where it's most needed.

[Brian_K_White → BiteCode_dev]

cut? I don't even leave the shell.

echo ... |while read a b x ;do ... ;done