title: How do I extract a column from text using Python?
body: <p>I am a newbie in python programing. Wrote this script by searching in python docs from internet.</p>
  
  <p>Could anybody please help me to get only the second column as output of "ps aux" command(ie only the PID Column).</p>
  
  <pre><code>#script to print the processid
  import os
  import commands
  out=commands.getoutput('ps aux') # to get the process listing in out
  #print out
  #print out[2] #print only second column from out
  print out[:2] 
  
  output of "print out" statement
  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  root         1  0.0  0.0   5728  1068 ?        Ss   Oct13   0:07 /sbin/init
  root         2  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S&lt;   Oct13   0:00 [kthreadd]
  root         3  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S&lt;   Oct13   0:00 [migration/0]
  root         4  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S&lt;   Oct13   0:11 [ksoftirqd/0]
  root         5  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S&lt;   Oct13   0:00 [watchdog/0]
  root         6  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        S&lt;   Oct13   0:00 [migration/1]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance </p>