The interested reader should not assume hastily, however, that tr -s is enough to make cut behave exactly like awk. Hint: leading spaces. pi:~$ echo ' foo'

The interested reader should not assume hastily, however, that tr -s is enough to make cut behave exactly like awk. Hint: leading spaces. pi:~$ echo ' foo' | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f 1 pi:~$ echo ' foo' | awk '{print $1}' foo