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  • You probably want to look into awk which is probably best suited for these tabular information operations. sed and cut are more useful for isolated incidents where you have a single delimited line and want to extract fields from it. Anytime you get more elaborate with it, you should switch over to awk Commented Jul 13, 2016 at 2:38
  • FYI This whole thing could be done in one 'real' SQL statement after one or maybe a few setup depending on your DBMS, and if the volume of data is large it would likely perform much better because DBMSs have sophisticated optimizers to deal with just this kind of data operation whereas shell does exactly and only what you tell it. But you don't want that so I won't suggest it. Commented Jul 14, 2016 at 6:53