This is NOT a duplicate of another question. All previous questions/solutions posted on stackoverflow have got the same issue: additional spaces get replaced into a single space.
Example (1.txt)
filename Nospaces filename One space filename Two spaces filename Three spaces Result:
awk '{$1="";$0=$0;$1=$1}1' 1.txt One space Two spaces Three spaces awk '{$1=""; print substr($0,2)}' 1.txt One space Two spaces Three spaces Specify IFS with -F option to avoid omitting multiple space by awk
awk -F "[ ]" '{$1="";$0=$0;$1=$1}1' 1.txt awk -F "[ ]" '{$1=""; print substr($0,2)}' 1.txt 
If you define a field as any number of non-space characters followed by any number of space characters, then you can remove the first N like this:
$ sed -E 's/([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]*){1}//' file Nospaces One space Two spaces Three spaces Change {1} to {N}, where N is the number of fields to remove. If you only want to remove 1 field from the start, then you can remove the {1} entirely (as well as the parentheses which are used to create a group):
sed -E 's/[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]*//' file Some versions of sed (e.g. GNU sed) allow you to use the shorthand:
sed -E 's/(\S+\s*){1}//' file If there may be some white space at the start of the line, you can add a \s* (or [[:space:]]*) to the start of the pattern, outside of the group:
sed -E 's/\s*(\S+\s*){1}//' file The problem with using awk is that whenever you touch any of the fields on given record, the entire record is reformatted, causing each field to be separated by OFS (the Output Field Separator), which is a single space by default. You could use awk with sub if you wanted but since this is a simple substitution, sed is the right tool for the job.
* instead of a +). I guess that it should do what you expect now.To preserve whitespace in awk, you'll have to use regular expression substitutions or use substrings. As soon as you start modifying individual fields, awk has to recalculate $0 using the defined (or implicit) OFS.
Referencing Tom's sed answer:
awk '{sub(/^([^[:blank:]]+[[:blank:]]+){1}/, "", $0); print}' 1.txt 
gawk --re-interval '...'Use cut:
cut -d' ' -f2- a.txt prints all columns from the second to the last and preserves whitespace.
cut. Updated the answer.cut is obviously the right tool for the job. Usually asking something like "do this with tool A or B" is frowned upon because you already suggesting a probably wrong solution in the question. Why are you forced to use awk or sed?Working code in awk, no leading space, supporting multiple space in the columns and printing from the n-th column:
awk '{ print substr($0, index($0,$column_id)) }' 1.txt echo foo bar baz bar | awk -v column_id=4 '{print substr($0, index($0,$column_id))}' will print too many columns