cut - lack of --merge-delimiters option

[Jan Skowron]

coreutils program "cut" could use a "merge delimiters" option.

Common use case: ls -l | cut ...
One needs to print 7-th column of ls -l to see all times of
modifications. But there is no constant number of delimiters between
column, eg:
drwxr-xr-x  23 user     group  4096 Mar 16  2006 user
drwx------   2 root     root  16384 Dec 19  2003 lost+found

merge delimiters option would help a lot in such cases. Without it
users are forced to use "gawk" instead of "cut".

Are any chances for introducing enhancements like that to coreutils?

Thanks,
Jan