"No such file or directory" using cut in a while read loop in bash [duplicate]

Question

I have this sample text file text.txt that is in the form

fruits    vegetables
apples    cucumbers
oranges    squash

and it is tab delimited.

I would like to loop through the file line by line, and extract each column value.

Below is the code the code I have tried.

while read p
do
  echo "Line"
  fruit="$(cut -f 1 $p)"

  echo "${fruit}"
done <test.txt

My expected output should be something like:

Line
fruits
Line
apples
Line
oranges

Instead I get this output:

Line
cut: fruits: No such file or directory
cut: vegetables: No such file or directory

Line
cut: apples: No such file or directory
cut: cucumbers: No such file or directory

Line
cut: oranges: No such file or directory
cut: squash: No such file or directory

while IFS=$'\t' read -r col1 rest; do echo "$col1"; done. There's no reason to use cut or anything like it. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Jul 19, 2019 at 16:38
...that said, in general, you should show your actual output, not just expected output. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Jul 19, 2019 at 16:39
...to explain your immediate bug: cut -f 1 $p expects $p to expand to a filename, which is what cut then tries to read from. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Jul 19, 2019 at 16:40
See above running successfully @ ideone.com/XMEpTP; I'm going to be closing this question with a duplicate momentarily. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Jul 19, 2019 at 16:41
I just added also the actual output. How would I modify your script to print the second filed as well? — Andrew Hamel
– Andrew Hamel, Commented Jul 19, 2019 at 16:44

Brian Agnew · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-19 16:42:04Z

0

I would like to loop through the file line by line, and extract each column value

Is awk not suitable ?

awk '{ print "Line"; print $1 }' < test.txt

answered Jul 19, 2019 at 16:42

Brian Agnew

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