There’s no way to cut it when it comes to telling you how to use this great tool!
Whenever I’ve used it, I commonly use it in lieu of a user’s home directory: $(pwd | cut -d\/ -f5). This helps me save time from copy and pasting the install name, however it doesn’t always work.
For example, if we’re not in /path/to/live/SITE or /path/to/log/SITE then cut can’t grab the appropriate path. Let me break it down by first running pwd.
spencer@local:/nas/content/live/dubtraxx/wp-content/themes/minimum-pro$ pwd /nas/content/live/dubtraxx/wp-content/themes/minimum-pro
We see that it’s printing the working directory, all the way up to the directory we’re in. PWD is just printing the folder I’m currently in, including the server’s absolute path. Whenever you include the -d you’re telling pwd that you want to use / as your delimiter (separator).
However, since /is a special character in Linux’s bash shell, we need to escape it by adding a backslash \.
On this note, it’s also perfectly acceptable to use -d'/' instead of a \ to signal the delimiter of choice to cut.
Let’s take a look at what happens if we run the following:
spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d\/ -f2 path spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d\/ -f3 to spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d\/ -f4 live spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d\/ -f5 dubtraxx
And for some testing…
spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d'/' -f4- live/dubtraxx spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d\/ -f2- path/to/live/dubtraxx spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d\/ -f1 spencer@local~ :/path/to/live/dubtraxx $ pwd | cut -d\/ -f1- /path/to/live/dubtraxx
There are many more uses for cut, but we’ll go over those in another tutorial.
Ciao!