Cut Linux variable number of spaces

Question

I need to get in linux the third column...

I used first last | cut -d " " -f 3 but it doesn't work and after that I taught the char is a TAB and used last | cut -f 2 and it's still not working...

how shoult i get that?

Answer 1

You might try it with awk :

<your-program-giving-tabular-output> | awk '{ print $3 }'

For example with ps :

ps | awk '{ print $3 }'