text: Q:
  
  How to cut the file into two fields in shell?
  
  Please unzip the file which download from :
  http://s.yunio.com/MT3r2x
  The data format is :
     ‘x + y’                         x plus y                                  
     ‘x - y’                         x minus y                                 
     ‘x*y’                           juxtapose x and y                         
     ‘x/y’                           x forwardslash y                          
     ‘x %+-% y’                      x plus or minus y              
  
  For
  cut -c 1-43   maths.txt  
  
  The output is :
     ‘x + y’                         
     ‘x - y’                         
     ‘x*y’                           
     ‘x/y’                           
     ‘x %+-% y’                      
  
  For
  cut -c 44-    maths.txt  
  
  The output is :
  x plus y                                
  x minus y                               
  juxtapose x and y                       
  x forwardslash y                        
  x plus or minus y 
  
  The two fields are  what i want to get. 
  Why i can't use the following command to cut it into two fields?
  cut -d' ' -f2  maths.txt  or  cut -d'        ' -f2 maths.txt(ctrl+v+tab)  can do neither.
  
  A:
  
  Your cut -d' ' -f2  maths.txt  or  cut -d'        ' -f2 maths.txt(ctrl+v+tab)  are working. The problem is that they print the text in each line after first space and before second one. As you have a lot of spaces, it just shows spaces.
  What you can do is to cat the original one and pipe it using col like this:
  cat maths.txt | col | cut -d$'\t' -f1 # first col 
  cat maths.txt | col | cut -d$'\t' -f2 # second col
  
  