>The cut program could be changed to do things differently. But then
it would not be cut, it would be sed, awk, perl, ruby, etc. That
Reductio ad absurdum. I am suggesting that cut merely be taught to recognize
random amounts of whitespace as a delimiter, which would make it a more useful
utility without changing its other behaviors. That would no more make it an
awk than adding a JATO unit to a car would make it a space shuttle.
wc -l ~/.alias | awk '{print$1}'
Sure, I'm aware of this, and a couple of solutions in perl. But this is a
classic case of using a cutting torch to open a can of beans. Also, it adds
quotes to the command line, which I like to avoid because they often
complicate things.