Last Updated on July 1, 2023
choose is a human-friendly and fast alternative to cut and (sometimes) awk.
choose is not designed to be a drop-in or complete replacement for cut or awk. Instead, it’s a simple and intuitive tool to reach for when the basics of awk or cut will do, but the overhead of getting them to behave should not be necessary.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Terse field selection syntax similar to Python’s list slices.
- Negative indexing from end of line.
- Optional start/end index.
- Zero-indexed.
- Reverse ranges.
- Slightly faster than cut for sufficiently long inputs, much faster than awk.
- Regular expression field separators using Rust’s regex syntax.
Website: github.com/theryangeary/choose
Support:
Developer: Ryan Geary
License: GNU General Public License v3.0

choose is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Alternatives to awk | |
|---|---|
| gawk | Implementation of the awk programming language |
| GoAWK | POSIX-compliant awk interpreter written in Go |
| Miller | Small and powerful CLI tool to do all your data processing |
| frawk | Small programming language for writing short programs processing textual data |
| choose | Human-friendly and fast alternative to cut and (sometimes) awk |
| gema | General purpose text processing utility based on the concept of pattern matching |
| mawk | Interpreter for the awk programming language |
| ruplacer | Find and replace text in source files |
| rawk | POSIX compatible AWK written in Rust |
| wak | awk implementation for toybox and standalone |
| PAWK | Python line processor |
| Hawk | Haskell text processor for the command-line |
| Alternatives to cut | |
|---|---|
| hck | Drop-in replacement that can use a regex delimiter instead of a fixed string |
| tuc | Drop-in replacement for cut |
| choose | Human-friendly and fast alternative to cut |
| ccut | Colum's cut |
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