Choose

This is choose, a human-friendly alternative to awk and cut

Rationale

The AWK programming language is designed for text processing and is extremely capable in this endeavor. However, the awk command is not ideal for rapid shell use, with its requisite quoting of a line wrapped in curly braces, even for the simplest of programs:

awk '{print $1}'

Likewise, cut is far from ideal for rapid shell use, because it is difficult to get the confusing syntax correct on the first attempt. Field separators and ranges are just plain difficult to use.

It is for these reasons that I present to you choose. It is not meant to be a drop-in or complete replacement for either of the aforementioned tools, but rather a simple and intuitive tool to reach for when the basics of awk or cut will do, but the overhead of getting them to behave should not be necessary.

Usage

choose [OPTIONS] <FIELDS> FILE

Options

-f <NUM>        Field separator
-i              Inclusive ranges

Examples

choose 5                # print the 5th item from a line (zero indexed)
choose -f ':' 0 3 5     # print the 0th, 3rd, and 5th item from a line, where
                        # items are separated by ':' instead of whitespace
choose 2:5              # print everything from the 2nd to 5th item on the line,
                        # exclusive of the 5th
choose -i 2:5           # print everything from the 2nd to 5th item on the line,
                        # inclusive of the 5th
choose :3               # print the beginning of the line to the 3rd item,
                        # exclusive
choose 3:               # print the third item to the end of the line