To get first and last occurrence when cut using a delimiter

Question

I have a text file a.txt with following data

 abc/def/ghi  
 jkl/mno/pqr/stu

I need to cut them so that I get first and last string with "/" as delimiter

Output expected is

abc ghi
jkl stu


cat a.txt |cut -d "/" -f1               #gives me first cell
cat a.txt |rev |cut -d "/" -f1 |rev     #gives me last cell

I want both cells to be available in single command. Kindly help.

Answer 1

You could use awk for this,

$ awk -F/ '{print $1,$NF}' file
abc ghi  
jkl stu

Through sed,

$ sed 's~^\([^/]*\).*\/\(.*\)$~\1 \2~g' file
abc ghi  
jkl stu

Through perl,

$ perl -pe 's;^([^/]*).*\/(.*)$;\1 \2;g' file
abc ghi  
jkl stu

Ugly hack through grep and paste,

$ grep -oP '^[^/]*|\w+(?=$)' file | paste -d' ' - -
abc ghi
jkl stu