Question

Which one of the following commands is incorrect?

(a) $ cut -d “|”  -f  1,4  emp.lst

(b) $ cut -c -3 emp.lst

(c) $ tail -c 511 foo

(d) $ tail -c foo

The question was asked in an online interview.

This key question is from Filtering Commands in portion Simple Filters of Unix

Answer 1

Right choice is (d) $ tail -c foo

For explanation I would say: tail(1) command is used for extracting bytes instead of lines while cut(1) command is used for extracting columns and fields. But if we are using tail(1) command, we have to specify an integer value after the -c option, otherwise, the command will fail.