sed cut columns

hello everyone !

i face the following problem as i use sed to ignore some columns of an output.
the command i use is

sed 's/^\([A-Za-z0-9]*\) \([A-Za-z0-9]*\).*/\1 \2/'

as i only want the 2 first columns the command finger returns

the problem is that for some lines the results are fine but for other lines
it only prints the 1 column and totally ignores the 2nd..

when i change the order like this

sed 's/^\([A-Za-z0-9]*\) \([A-Za-z0-9]*\).*/\2 \1/'

as i'm trying to find out what's wrong with these lines,the output of the column 1 is ok but for those lines column 2 did not appear before,now it appears as a white space.

thanks in advance

Can you post sample input and desired output?

can you post the sample input and output data

yes the input is like this:

nickname name lastname date hour

and the desired output is

nickname name

the thing is that for some lines works fine and for others only

nickname

is shown, that's why i changed the order so the output turns out to be

name nickname

and for the lines with the problem the name is just a white space so i figured that's why it wasn't shown before

can you post the sample input and output data

i use finger command in order to see which users are logged in and the results

Login Name Tty Idle Login Time Office
ja James Adams pts/6 23 Apr 30 13:21 (:0)
kj Kim Jones tty10 Apr 30 14:06 (:0)

then i want only the column login and name

finger | awk '{print $1,$2}'

finger | tr -s " " | cut -d " " -f1-2

ok thanks a lot! it works just fine!
and what if i want the columns of the output to have a tab among them?