How to use Cut Command in Linux

Cut command can be used to display only specific columns from a text file or
other command outputs.
Following are some of the examples.

Display the 1st field (employee name) from a colon delimited file

$ cut -d: -f 1 names.txt
Emma Thomas
Alex Jason
Madison Randy
Sanjay Gupta
Nisha Singh

Display 1st and 3rd field from a colon delimited file

$ cut -d: -f 1,3 names.txt
Emma Thomas:Marketing
Alex Jason:Sales
Madison Randy:Product Development
Sanjay Gupta:Support
Nisha Singh:Sales

Display only the first 8 characters of every line in a file

$ cut -c 1-8 names.txt
Emma Tho
Alex Jas
Madison
Sanjay G
Nisha Si

Misc Cut command examples
o cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd Displays the unix login names for all the users
 in the system.
o free | tr -s ' ' | sed '/^Mem/!d' | cut -d" " -f2 Displays the total
 memory available on the system.