cut and paste in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Extract and Combine Text Columns Using cut and paste

📖 Scenario: You work in a small office where you receive a text file with employee data. The file has names and departments separated by spaces. You want to extract the names and departments separately, then combine them side by side into a new file.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to use the cut command to extract columns from a text file and the paste command to combine columns side by side.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use cut to extract the first column (names) from employees.txt into names.txt.

Use cut to extract the second column (departments) from employees.txt into departments.txt.

Use paste to combine names.txt and departments.txt side by side into combined.txt.

Print the contents of combined.txt to the terminal.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Extracting and combining columns from text files is common when working with logs, reports, or CSV data in automation scripts.

💼 Career

Knowing how to manipulate text files with commands like <code>cut</code> and <code>paste</code> is useful for system administrators, data analysts, and anyone automating data processing tasks.

1

Create the initial data file

Create a file called employees.txt with these exact lines:
Alice Sales
Bob Marketing
Charlie IT

Bash Scripting

# Create employees.txt with the given lines
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo with -e and redirect output to employees.txt.

2

Extract names and departments into separate files

Use cut to extract the first column (names) from employees.txt into a file called names.txt.
Then use cut to extract the second column (departments) into a file called departments.txt.

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Alice Sales\nBob Marketing\nCharlie IT" > employees.txt
# Extract first column to names.txt
# Extract second column to departments.txt
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use cut -d ' ' -f1 for the first column and cut -d ' ' -f2 for the second column.

3

Combine the extracted columns side by side

Use the paste command to combine names.txt and departments.txt side by side into a new file called combined.txt.

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Alice Sales\nBob Marketing\nCharlie IT" > employees.txt
cut -d ' ' -f1 employees.txt > names.txt
cut -d ' ' -f2 employees.txt > departments.txt
# Combine names.txt and departments.txt into combined.txt
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use paste with the two filenames and redirect output to combined.txt.

4

Display the combined file

Print the contents of combined.txt to the terminal using cat.

Bash Scripting

echo -e "Alice Sales\nBob Marketing\nCharlie IT" > employees.txt
cut -d ' ' -f1 employees.txt > names.txt
cut -d ' ' -f2 employees.txt > departments.txt
paste names.txt departments.txt > combined.txt
# Print combined.txt contents
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use cat combined.txt to show the file contents.