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

[James Devenish]

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 08:59:27AM +0800, David Buddrige wrote:
> 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]
[...]
> 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? 

A quick-and-dirty answer is `ps -aux | awk '{ print $2; }'` (makes a few
assumptions about your system and ps output, and will return the 'PID'
header as the first line, but hey...).