Extract first three columns from all tsv files in a folder

Question

I have several tsv files in a folder which add up to over 50 gb total. To make it easier on memory when loading these files into R, I want to extract only the first 3 columns of these files.

How can all of the files have their columns extracted at once in terminal? I am running Ubuntu 16.04.

Answer 1

This looks like a perfect use case for the cut utility

You can use it as follows:

cut -d$"\t" -f 1-3 folder/*

Where -d specifies the field delimiter (in this case tabs), -f specifies the fields to extract and folder/* is a glob specifying all files to be parsed.