how to go to the certain column or part of the line using "sed" command?

Question

Permissions   links  Owner  Group  Size   Date        Time    Directory or file
-rwxr--r--     1     User1  root    26    2012-04-12  19:51    MyFile.txt
drwxrwxr-x     3     User2  csstf  4096   2012-03-15  00:12     MyDir 

Note that each space is a tab space.
I need to go to the size column. How can I do that using sed command. Because I cannot continue my work due to that. I don't know how to split and take certain part of the line using sed command.

Answer 1

awk suites it better:

awk -F'\t' '{print $5}' file

Using sed:

sed -r 's/^([^\t]+\t){4}([^\t]+).*$/\2/' file
Size
26
4096