more efficent shell text manipulation

Answer 1

Short answer: not really

Longer answer: cut is intended for slicing up lines of text, it does that well. If you need a more complicated behavior, you'll need a text manipulation language. You have rejected the old time answers, so I'll recommend perl.

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Any particular reason you don't want to use sed or awk?

Answer 2

edit: I just wanted to know if it was possible without sed or awk, otherwise how would you do it with awk?

awk -F: '{print $2"."}'