What do these successive cut commands do?
cut -f2 -d'"' | cut -f1 -d':'
+2
A:
It means take the second field (-f2) as separated by double quote marks (-d'"', which the shell parses to -d' before running cut) , and then the first field (-f1) of that as separated by colons (-d:).
For instance, Phil Miller"developer:junior will be processed to developer. This is a very contrived example, and it would be useful to see what is actually being used as input to that pipeline.
Novelocrat
2009-08-31 22:56:58
Note that if the line does not start with a quote, this will take what you'd read as the first quoted string in the line, while if it does start with a quote, it'll grab what's after the second quote.
Jefromi
2009-08-31 22:58:38
+1
A:
The "-f" is the "field specifier" and the "-d" is the delimiter.
The command above says to first cut the line up using '"' as the delimiter and return back the 2nd field ('-f2'). The second command cuts up that result using the ':' delimiter and returns back the 1st field.
Cut is useful for parsing through csv-like files, which have potentially embedded delimiters.
Andy White
2009-08-31 22:58:07