Lab 5.1 - question concerning Linux 'cut' command

Hi @chrispokorni ,

I am not sure I can articulate it well but I understand why the following is expected (text separated by 5 spaces)
Note: used for the same reason you mentioned in your reply

1. field1<5spc>field2<5spc>field3, running cut -d " " -f 2 results in "blank"
2. field1<5spc>field2<5spc>field3, running cut -d " " -f 6 results in "field2"
3. field1<5spc>field2<5spc>field3, running cut -d " " -f 11 results in "field3"

For a single file with 3 rows (1st row separated by 1 space, 2nd by 2, and 3rd by 3)

#start of file
field1<1spc>field2<1spc>field3
field1<2spc>field2<2spc>field3
field1<3spc>field2<3spc>field3
#end of file

If running 'cut -d " " -f 3' on the file above the result would be:

field3
field2
<blank>

In the above '-f 3' indicates that what follows the 2nd " " will be output for every line in the file; hence the 3rd line returning nothing because 'field1' and 'field2' are separated by 3 " "'s; but '-f 4' would return:

<blank>
<blank>
field2

Thank you for taking the time to give an explanation to the following command:

export client=$(grep client-cert $HOME/.kube/config |cut -d" " -f 6)

Now if the above command had the value of "-f" were changed to 5, then the following output would be:

client-certificate-data: