First question, so if the format's not correct, sorry!I like using the cut command in Linux with the -c flag. However, I'm interested in finding a command that sort of does the set inverse of cut. Essentially, given the input:drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 4096 4 20:15 bindrwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4096 4096 4 20:15 DesktopI would like to see everything except 4096 4 20:15. Here is the output:drwxrwxrwx 2 root root bindrwxrwxrwx 2 root root DesktopI want to be able to literally cut out between characters x and y, if that makes sense.Any ideas? I can't imagine it'd be a hard script to write but if there already exists a command for it, I'd love to use it.
Does the inverse command of cut exist?
text processing;cut
As others have pointed out, you should not parse the output of ls. Assuming you are using ls only as an example and will be parsing something else, there are a few ways of doing what you want:cut with  -d and -fcut -d ' ' -f 1,2,3,4,9from man cut:-d, --delimiter=DELIM      use DELIM instead of TAB for field delimiter-f, --fields=LIST      select only these fields;  also print any line      that contains no delimiter  character,  unless      the -s option is specifiedSpecifically for ls this is likely to fail since ls will change the amount of whitespace between consecutive fields to make them align better. cut treats foo<space>bar and foo<space><space>bar differently. awk and its variants split each input line into fields on white space so you can tell it to print only the fields you want:awk '{print $1,$2,$3,$4,$9}'Perlperl -lane 'print @F[0 .. 3,8]'