Neat, but both your tricks (rev and xargs) are more for getting the last word than getting the nth word. For the sake of the argument, say I have the following

Neat, but both your tricks (rev and xargs) are more for getting the last word than getting the nth word. For the sake of the argument, say I have the following fixed output and want the sizes: $ ls -l -rw-rw-r-- 1 userAAA group 588 Aug 29 00:25 file1 -rw-rw-r-- 1 userAA groupB 11870 Aug 29 00:24 file2 -rw-rw-r-- 1 userA groupBB 1166 Aug 28 23:56 file3 -rw-rw-r-- 1 user groupBBB 195 Aug 28 23:56 file4 I would just do: $ ls -l | awk '{print $5}'