Cutting fields from lines with multiple spaces

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Please see the following code, between "status" and "OK" exists many spaces, I want to get

status                        OK

. how to ignore multi spaces? If tab exists in the spaces, how to ignore it ?
Is there other commands can replace cut?

[river@localhost CLI008003]$ echo 'drv status                        OK'| cut -d " " -f 2-3
status 
[river@localhost CLI008003]$ echo 'drv status                        OK'| cut -d " " -f 2-
status                        OK
[river@localhost CLI008003]$ echo 'drv status                        OK'| cut -d " " -f 3

[river@localhost CLI008003]$
2

You can't do it with cut, but awk is a perfect tool for it:

awk '{print $2, $3}'
3

However, awk can not print the content between $2 and $3.

4

:confused: You asked about ignoring and not about preserving spaces and tabs.
Use sed.