In some of my recent articles on text processing, I have explained the use of sed command in Linux/Unix. In case of sed command, we provide an input file to the command, it reads the file line-by-line, processes each line and then prints it on the STDOUT. So, in brief, its a row-wise operation. Similar is the case with cut command – there is an input file, there is processing part and the processed output can be displayed on STDOUT or saved in a file. A minor difference between sed and cut is that, cut command processes the file in vertical manner. So, the outcome of the cut command is a single or multiple columns.

Source: Cut Command in Linux – Extract Fields and Columns from a file ~ Your Own Linux..!