Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Specifying the range of characters or bytes as fields

A report with fixed-width columns will have varying numbers of spaces between the columns. You can't extract values based on field position, but you can extract them based on the character location. The cut command can select based on bytes or characters as well as fields.

It's unreasonable to enter every character position to extract, so cut accepts these notations as well as the comma-separated list:

N-	From the Nth byte, character, or field, to the end of the line
N-M	From the Nth to Mth (included) byte, character, or field
-M	From the first to Mth (included) byte, character, or field

We use the preceding notations to specify fields as a range of bytes, characters, ...