Keep newlines in output of cut

Question

Let's imagine we have a file:

foo bar
foo1 bar1

I want to cut every second word in every line, so I want file to look like this:

foo
foo1

I am trying to use cut -d ' ' -f -1 but what I get is:

foo foo1

How can i preserve line endings in the file?

Answer 1

file contents

john@caffe:~$ cat listing.txt
foo bar baz
foo1 bar1 baz1

getting the first column only

john@caffe:~$ cut -d' ' -f1 listing.txt
foo
foo1

getting the first and third column, this time from stdin through a pipe

john@caffe:~$ cat listing.txt | cut -d' ' -f1,3
foo baz
foo1 baz1

EDIT: I think I know what you're doing wrong

john@caffe:~$ foo=$(cut -d " " -f -1 listing.txt)
john@caffe:~$ echo $foo
foo foo1
john@caffe:~$ echo "$foo"
foo
foo1

Answer 2

Check the --output-delimiter option of cut, i.e. cut -f 1 -d ' ' --output-delimiter='\n' in your case