Which one is faster to process? Print columns with Awk or Cut?

Question

I have about 100 million rows and 6 fields separated by a space, each field has seven-digit numbers.

I like to delete the 2nd field and can achieve it with the following

1. awk '{print $1,$3,$4,$5,$6}' input.txt

2. cut --delimiter=' ' --fields=1,3-6 input.txt

Which one is faster to have the desired output? Is there a way to time the process?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Is there a way to time the process?

Yes. Just prepend the command time before your code and it will return how long it took. Do it for each one.

time awk '{print $1,$3,$4,$5,$6}' input.txt
time cut --delimiter=' ' --fields=1,3-6 input.txt

With a quick bit of profiling it looks like cut just barely wins out in this scenario. It's still quite an impressive time for awk considering how much more capable it is over cut.

cut

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do cut --delimiter=' ' --fields=1,3-6 >/dev/null <<<"one two three four five six seven"; done

real    0m4.074s
user    0m0.496s
sys     0m2.799s

awk

$ time for i in {1..1000}; do awk '{print $1,$3,$4,$5,$6}' >/dev/null <<<"one two three four five six seven"; done

real    0m4.511s
user    0m0.728s
sys     0m3.165s