I think the easist way is to use awk. you can even do it from within R by
"system" (I think).
With

      awk "BEGIN{FS=\"\t\";OFS=\"\t\"} {print \$3, \$8}" datafile >
tmp_datafile

you extract columns 3 and 84 from a tab-separated file "datafile" and write
to "tmp_datafile".
If you are on windows you can use awk95 (from somewhere in web-space).

Czes'c'
Maciej


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