title: bash: shortest way to get n-th column of output
body: <p>Let's say that during your workday you repeatedly encounter the following form of columnized output from some command in bash (in my case from executing <code>svn st</code> in my Rails working directory):</p>
  
  <pre><code>?       changes.patch
  M       app/models/superman.rb
  A       app/models/superwoman.rb
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in order to work with the output of your command - in this case the filenames - some sort of parsing is required so that the second column can be used as input for the next command.</p>
  
  <p>What I've been doing is to use <code>awk</code> to get at the second column, e.g. when I want to remove all files (not that that's a typical usecase :), I would do:</p>
  
  <pre><code>svn st | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Since I type this a lot, a natural question is: is there a shorter (thus cooler) way of accomplishing this in bash?</p>
  
  <p>NOTE:
  What I am asking is essentially a shell command question even though my concrete example is on my svn workflow. If you feel that workflow is silly and suggest an alternative approach, I probably won't vote you down, but others might, since the question here is really how to get the n-th column command output in bash, in the shortest manner possible. Thanks :)</p>