Interview › Scripting (Bash, Groovy)
What is the difference between cut, awk, and sed for text processing? [Intermediate]
Answer
cut is best for simple fixed delimiters or character/byte ranges, awk is a field-processing language for records, calculations, and conditions, and sed is a stream editor for substitutions and line transformations.
Technical explanation
Use cut when the delimiter and field positions are simple.
Use awk when logic, numeric aggregation, multiple conditions, or formatted output is needed.
Use sed for search/replace, deleting lines, printing ranges, and simple stream edits.
Hands-on example
# cut: get username from passwd
cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd
# awk: print users with UID >= 1000
awk -F: '$3 >= 1000 {print $1, $3}' /etc/passwd
# sed: replace debug with info
sed 's/debug/info/g' app.conf
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