How can I use a triple slash as a delimiter with cut? I have a table in which each entry looks something like, coagulation factor VIII-associated 1 /// coagulation factor VIII-associated 2 /// coagulation factor VIII-associated 3 I would like to use `cut -d/// -f2 myfile.txt`, but I'm getting an error: > cut: bad delimiter Same case when I use single quotes or double quotes around the delimiter: `cut -d'///' -f2 myfile.txt` `cut -d"///" -f2 myfile.txt` Do I have to escape the slash somehow? If so, what is the escape character for cut? Documentation doesn't seem to have that information, and I tried \\.

If the delimiter is _anything other than one fixed character_ , then `cut` is the _wrong_ tool.

Use `awk` instead.

Consider this test file which has three fields:


$ cat file
one///two/2//two///three


To print the second field and only the second field:


$ awk -F/// '{print $2}' file
two/2//two