[plug] Using the "cut" command on fields seperated with variable number of spaces

[David Buddrige]

Hi all, 

If I run the command: 

ps -aux 

I get the following output. 

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.0  1368   76 ?        S     2002   0:04 init [5]
root         2  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   0:00 [keventd]
root         3  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   0:00 [kapm-idled]
root         4  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   5:01 [kswapd]
root         5  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   0:00 [kreclaimd]
root         6  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   3:05 [bdflush]
root         7  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   0:21 [kupdated]
root         8  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW<   2002   0:00 [mdrecoveryd]
root        73  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   0:00 [khubd]
root       509  0.0  0.0  1428  332 ?        S     2002   0:01 syslogd -m 0
root       514  0.0  0.0  1864  112 ?        S     2002   0:00 klogd -2
rpcuser    543  0.0  0.0  1608    4 ?        S     2002   0:00 rpc.statd
root       617  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   0:05 [rpciod]
root       618  0.0  0.0     0    0 ?        SW    2002   0:00 [lockd]
root       633  0.0  0.0  1352    4 ?        S     2002   0:00 
/usr/sbin/apmd -p
root       652  0.0  0.0 18012  280 ?        S     2002   0:00 ypbind 


In the past, when I have tried to extract a single field from a list, I
have used the cut command to specify the appropriate field, however in this
instance, there is no delimeter between the fields, other than a variable
number of spaces.  Does anyone know how to extract (for example) the PID 
field from this kind of output? 

thanks guys 

David.