Consider the input a b Awk will treat it as having two columns (by default), while cut will treat each space as it’s own column. Awk is also a little n

Consider the input a b Awk will treat it as having two columns (by default), while cut will treat each space as it’s own column. Awk is also a little nicer for whitespace; cut makes specifying the delimiter (with say “-d\ “) a little more vexing.