On Tue, 14 Jun 2011, Chetan Tiwari wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I was having trouble using the cut command and wasn't sure if anyone else on
> this list faced a similar problem. Perhaps I am doing something wrong and
> any help will be much appreciated.
>
> I am using SL6 and the version of cut installed is "cut (GNU coreutils)
> 8.4". I have a text file with the following line:
>
> abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
>
> When I execute the following statement: "cut -c1-3,24- test.txt", I get the
> correct output: abcxyz. When I run the same command, but with a
> --output-delimiter flag (i.e. cut -c1-3,24- test.txt
> --output-delimiter="|"), I get the exact same output as before: abcxyz. The
> delimiter (I - pipe symbol) is missing.

  What is LANG/LC_ALL enveronment in your shell?
If it is something with .UTF-8 try to set it without suffix.
LANG=C cut --output-delimiter="|" -c 1-3,24- test.txt
should do the trick.

>
> When I run the exact same commands on a machine running Ubuntu with "cut
> (GNU coreutils) 7.4", I get the desired output: abc|xyz. The same problem
> occurs with larger data files that I was trying to manipulate as well.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Chetan
>

-- 
Best regards,
  Valery Mitsyn