using command line autosplit option

[umasuresh]

Oh enlightened monks!
I am trying to use a on liner to extract the first three columns of file1 using the following command

perl -pane 'print "$F[0]\t$F[1]\t$F[2]";' file1.txt

But it prints the whole line along with the first 3 columns.

prints:
chr1    58963   Gchr1    58963   G       G       10      0       10   
+   1       ^+.     8

__file1__
chr1    58963   G       G       10      0       10      1       ^+.   
+  8

How do I fix this? Thanks much!

[Fletch]

The -p and -n flags are mutually exclusive (you want the later in this case). See perlrun.

[toolic]

Another way, with fewer characters, using perl 5.10 (-E and say), -l and array slices:

perl -lanE'say join"\t",@F[0..2]' file.txt

[umasuresh]

Thanks much Toolic and Fletch!