cut 2.0a

I run 'wc' on a file, .alias, containing 14 lines. It prints:
     14 /home/hacksaw/.alias

'wc -l ~/.alias | cut -f1' produces the same thing. This is non-intuitive.

'wc -l ~/.alias | cut -f1 -d" "' produces a blank line

'wc -l ~/.alias | cut -f1 -d"     "' produces
cut: the delimiter must be a single character

So cut is not a solution to print specific fields of input lines unless the delimiter is exactly one character. 

How often do the GNU utilities actually use tabs for that purpose? Obviously 'wc' doesn't.

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