Extracting file permissions

[Hygelac]

Hey,

I know there is a way to do this because I did it the other day but now for the life of me I can't remember how to, or find it through google. Basically, I want to extract segments from some output, specifically when I do a ls -l. For example, my output looks like:

-rwxrwx--- 0 hygelac csmajor 0 Sep 15 21:22 mytext.txt

I want to be able to break apart each segment, so for example I could just reference "-rwxrwx---".

I tried

ls -l mytext.txt | head -1

But that didn't work

[Cabhan]

So what head does is to print the first N lines of its input. So that's not what you want.

You are looking for a utility called cut. cut allows you to split input based on some delimiter (the default is a tab) and print out the fields that you want. So for instance:

tanya:~ alex$ echo "hello there" | cut -d' ' -f1
hello

The -d flag allows me to set the delimiter that I want (in this case, a single space). The -f flag allows me to set what fields I want to be printed. See the man page for more information.

I hope that helps! If you're trying to do more complicated field-splitting, you can use a tool like awk, but that is major overkill for this.