>cut doesn't work with fields separated by arbitrary whitespace. It's often better to use awk I use `cut` precisely when I want this behaviour. If something ac

>cut doesn't work with fields separated by arbitrary whitespace. It's often better to use awk I use `cut` precisely when I want this behaviour. If something actually is tab-separated, I don't want `cut -f3` to give me the 4th column just because the value in column 1 was the empty string.