I like awk very much, but cut has one big advantage over awk - you can easily output range of fields also open ended ones. Example: $ cat foo foo bar baz

I like awk very much, but cut has one big advantage over awk - you can easily output range of fields also open ended ones. Example: $ cat foo foo bar baz foo qux $ < foo cut -d' ' -f 2- bar baz qux As far as I know you have to loop through the fields, which is (haha) awkward.