How does the 'cut' command specify which characters to extract from a file?

The cut command specifies which characters to extract from a file using the -c option followed by the character positions you want to extract.

Here’s the syntax:

cut -c <character-list> <filename>

• <character-list> can be a single character position (e.g., 1), a range of positions (e.g., 1-5), or a combination of both (e.g., 1-5,7,9).
• <filename> is the name of the file you want to process.

Example

To extract the first 5 characters from a file named example.txt, you would use:

cut -c 1-5 example.txt

This command will output the first five characters of each line in example.txt.