I need to view a large tab delimited file using less. There is a column with ~200 characters which I am not interested in seeing but that column pushes all other columns to right making the viewing hard. Is there a way to prevent less from showing more than the tab width in a column?
2 Answers
You can use 'cut' to delete that column and redirect the output to less.
For eg if its the first column that you don't want to see
cut -f 1 --complement $FILENAME | less
If you have a delimiter other than tab, you can specify that using '-d;
cut -d ',' -f 1 --complement $FILENAME | less