I have been using the cut command a lot recently to shed extra data from large text files. I typically use cut with a specific delimiter by activating the -d switch and I thought that the -d switch was required. It turns out that -d is not required and by default -d actually defaults to the delimiter being a tab. When you need to have a tab as the delimiter for cut you simply don’t specify the -d switch. Below I show a couple examples of a file trimmed down using cut with and without the -d switch as well as another way to convert tabs in a file to spaces which then will allow you to use the Linux cut command with the -d” ” switch.

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The other day I needed to create a RightScript shell script that would update a couple configuration files on a server that was being launched in the RackSpace Cloud via RightScale. I decided to use SED to find and replace content within the configuration files. The first pass at the script failed because what I thought were spaces ended up being tabs. Use the information below to represent a tab within a shell script when using sed.

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Tonight while working on a web site for a client I was generating a header image that needed to be a specific width to fill out the header properly. The font selected by the client had the letters smashed together so I needed to add some space between the letters. I am not much of a designer so I had to play around with Adobe Photoshop until I was able to find the correct settings which happened to be named kerning and tracking. Kerning is used for a single letter and Tracking is used for a group of letters. These options are located in the Photoshop Character palette and can be modified using the steps below.

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