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Clarify cut command #1496

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Jul 25, 2025
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Clarify cut command #1496

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10 changes: 6 additions & 4 deletions episodes/04-pipefilter.md
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Expand Up @@ -549,10 +549,12 @@ For the file `animals.csv` from the previous exercise, consider the following co
$ cut -d , -f 2 animals.csv
```

The `cut` command is used to remove or 'cut out' certain sections of each line in the file,
and `cut` expects the lines to be separated into columns by a <kbd>Tab</kbd> character.
A character used in this way is called a **delimiter**.
In the example above we use the `-d` option to specify the comma as our delimiter character.
The `cut` command is used to select or 'cut out' certain sections of each line in the file for
further processing while leaving the original file unchanged.
By default, `cut` expects the lines to be separated into columns by a <kbd>Tab</kbd> character.
A character used in this way is called a **delimiter**.
In the example above we use the `-d` option to specify the comma as our delimiter character
instead of <kbd>Tab</kbd>.
We have also used the `-f` option to specify that we want to extract the second field (column).
This gives the following output:

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