awk '{print $3}' is what cut should have been all along. Specifically, this will give you the third space delimited field, where multiple spaces are coalesced.

awk '{print $3}' is what cut should have been all along. Specifically, this will give you the third space delimited field, where multiple spaces are coalesced. cut -d ' ' -f 3 will get you whatever is between the 3rd and 4th space.