Parsing Read ID's out of a SAM file

Question

[SaltedPork]

I need to get a list of the read ID's from a SAM file. Is anyone aware of any shortcuts to do this before I embark on writing a parser in Perl?

[Ram]

writing a parser should be the absolute last ditch effort. For any - any - format, there are at least 2-3 parsers out there already.

Answer 1

[Devon Ryan]

samtools view foo.sam | cut -f 1 would be quick and easy. You could also use grep and cut.

[GenoMax]

Followed by | sort | uniq if that is the ultimate aim.