nth

a Unix command line utility to filter stdin by column numbers

usage

cat foo | nth <columns>, each column being an integer index

building

cargo build --release

why?

an opportunity to learn Rust, and to scratch a command line itch.

what about cut?

cut works great for situations where the whitespace is fixed, e.g. a single space or single tab. nth groups columns by whitespace regardless of length.

what about awk?

filtering by columns is a basic use case for awk, and having a separate tool to do so reduces the syntactic overhead of writing out commands. no more awk "{print $1, $2, $3}" verbosity, instead just nth 1 2 3.

License

WTFPL