title: How to make the 'cut' command treat same sequental delimiters as one?
body: <p>I'm trying to extract a certain (the fourth) field from the column-based, 'space'-adjusted text stream. I'm trying to use the <code>cut</code> command in the following manner: </p>
  
  <p><code>cat text.txt | cut -d " " -f 4</code></p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, <code>cut</code> doesn't treat several spaces as one delimiter. I could have piped through awk</p>
  
  <p><code>awk '{ printf $4; }'</code> </p>
  
  <p>or sed</p>
  
  <p><code>sed  -E "s/[[:space:]]+/ /g"</code></p>
  
  <p>to collapse the spaces, but I'd like to know if there any way to deal with <code>cut</code> and several delimiters natively?</p>