On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Pádraig Brady <P@draigbrady.com> wrote:

awk is often suggested too as an alternative to cut.

No, I looked at awk, but it does not have a convenient way to specify lists of printed fields.

awk -e "BEGIN{FS="☺"; RS="☻"; OFS=FS; ORS=RS;}; {print $1,$2,$3,$15,$16,$17 ??? ) }

You got the picture...

It is possible to repeat a cut in awk (and documentation for awk does show how), but this would be a creation of an external application, not a one-liner with a tool from the box.