I'd normally do this sort of thing thusly:

perl -pale '$_=$F[1]'
[download]

• -p : enclose the script in while (<>) { ... } continue { print }
• -a : prepend  @F = split (within the loop)
• -l : strip "\n" (actually, $/) on input, put it back on output
• -e : treat the next arg as the script to be run, within the above conditions.

(update: forgot to mention, in case you didn't know: perldoc perlrun )

(another update: if you're using a Bourne-style shell -- bash, korn, zsh, etc -- you could add something like this to your shell's "rc" file:

pcol() {
perl -pale "\$_=\$F[$1]" $2
}
[download]

This defines a shell function that can be used as follows:

pcol 1 list.file  # prints $F[1] (second column) from list.file

ls -lg | pcol 4  # prints byte counts of files in cwd
[download]

Have fun...)