Sed substitution with back reference not working

Question

I receive output from a program as tab separated values, of which I am trying to obtain the second only using sed. I am currently using this:

sed -r -e "s/(^[^\t]+\t)([^\t]+\t)(.*$)/\2/"

However it does not seem to find matches. I have tried it in rubular were it does give me the match I want.

Answer 1

There is a specialized tool for selecting columns from text files called cut:

cut -f2 file

Here we instruct it to select only the second column, see the manpage for more information. Tab is the default column separator.