But that is exactly why you can't use cut in general for parsing CSVs - the usual CSV syntax includes quoted fields, in which commas don't separate the values.

But that is exactly why you can't use cut in general for parsing CSVs - the usual CSV syntax includes quoted fields, in which commas don't separate the values. But cut only examines the input charwise: % echo 'a,"b,c",d' | cut -f 1-3 -d "," a,"b,c" I don't think there's a good solution to this using standard tools, but I'm sure there are various CSV packages available. (Which I've never used! - I'm just familiar with this problem from seeing people try to work with CSV data in code using exactly the char-by-char approach taken by cut.)