suggestion for textutils

[Cesar Enrique Garcia]

 Dear sirs, 
 I don't want to notify a bug, but just a suggestion. I am working
constantly with tables formatted as fields separated by spaces (one or
more). It would be very useful a utility to extract fields from that
databse.
As an example of one of my databases:
UCM1348+2147  1.6972e-13       0            9.7137e-14              0
UCM1349+2151  5.7044e-14       0            1.5181e-14              0
UCM1349+2152  2.1981e-14       0            6.5993e-14              0
UCM1416+2202  7.894243e-16     3.6509e-14   7.198072e-16    2.345e-15

 It is not easy to extract just one field. I have tried cut, but the
delimiter can just be -d ' ', not several spaces.
 A better workaround, an easy script, the first argument being the file
and the second the field to extract:
#!/bin/csh -f
join $1 $1 -o 1.$2

 Would it be possible to create an utility with the ability to extract
several fields from a file?
 I apologize if this is the wrong place to ask for this..
 Thanks any way
 Cesar Enrique

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Cesar Enrique Garcia Dabo
Tf: (34)  91-394-45-77                      Fax: (34)  91-394-46-35
e-mail:   address@hidden
Dept. Astrofisica         //      Fac CC Fisicas 
Universidad Complutense   //      28040 Madrid (Spain)
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