Cut replacement

tuc

One of the most underused and underrated commands that you find built-in to the average terminal, cut has been around for a long time. While many of us can usually guess its function, our finite memory means it's usually easier to construct an equivalent command from pipes or even copy and paste than bother with the cut --help. The cut command helps you to extract various parts of a file, or piped input, by specifying ranges, delimiting characters, and even byte positions. It's powerful, but it's no longer the only cut command you should have in your path. That's because there's a new alternative called tuc, a cunningly named tool that does everything cut does while also filling in gaps in its functionality. And it does far more than reversing the order of text.

One of cut's best uses is to process and extract data from a comma-separated list, and this is a good example of something that tuc improves upon. tuc is good at extracting the same data in the same way, but as its name implies, it's particularly good at rearranging the order of the fields it extracts. You can do this by simply specifying the new order for each delimited value (-f) after specifying a delimiter (-d) to use, such as a comma. You can then put the same or different delimiters into the output text or pipe the output for more processing. It's also easy to replace fields or their delimiters or reformat the output using references to the various values retrieved from the input stream. It sounds abstract when written like this, but tuc is actually easy to use and solves many of the problems you find when trying to import or process a list of values with cut.

Project Website

https://github.com/riquito/tuc

You easily reverse a list of items or even entire lines of text with tuc, thank to its ability to handle negative indexes.

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