Suppose we have this data file.
john 32 maketing executive jack 41 chief technical officer jim 27 developer dela 33 assistant risk management officer I want to print using awk
john maketing executive jack chief technical officer jim developer dela assistant risk management officer I know it can be done using for.
awk '{printf $1; for(i=3;i<=NF;i++){printf " %s", $i} printf "\n"}' < file Problem is its long and looks complex.
Is there any other short way to print rest of the fields.
Set the field(s) you want to skip to blank:
awk '{$2 = ""; print $0;}' < file_name Source: Using awk to print all columns from the nth to the last
print $0 that could be replaced by a simple 1
1 in-place of print $0, I don't get any output from awk. You sure they're equivalent?
print $0 and put 1 after the closing }.Reliably with GNU awk for gensub() when using the default FS:
$ gawk -v delNr=2 '{$0=gensub("^([[:space:]]*([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+){"delNr-1"})[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]*","\\1","")}1' file john maketing executive jack chief technical officer jim developer dela assistant risk management officer With other awks, you need to use match() and substr() instead of gensub(). Note that the variable delNr above tells awk which field you want to delete:
$ gawk -v delNr=3 '{$0=gensub("^([[:space:]]*([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+){"delNr-1"})[^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]*","\\1","")}1' file john 32 executive jack 41 technical officer jim 27 dela 33 risk management officer Do not do this:
awk '{sub($2 OFS, "")}1' as the same text that's in $2 might be at the end of $1, and/or $2 might contain RE metacharacters so there's a very good chance that you'll remove the wrong string that way.
Do not do this:
awk '{$2=""}1' file as it adds an FS and will compress all other contiguous white space between fields into a single blank char each.
Do not do this:
awk '{$2="";sub(" "," ")}1' file as it hasthe space-compression issue mentioned above and relies on a hard-coded FS of a single blank (the default, though, so maybe not so bad) but more importantly if there were spaces before $1 it would remove one of those instead of the space it's adding between $1 and $2.
One last thing worth mentioning is that in recent versions of gawk there is a new function named patsplit() which works like split() BUT in addition to creating an array of the fields, it also creates an array of the spaces between the fields. What that means is that you can manipulate fields and the spaces between then within the arrays so you don't have to worry about awk recompiling the record using OFS if you manipulate a field. Then you just have to print the fields you want from the arrays. See patsplit() in http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#String-Functions for more info.
cut is better. If you have anything else then gawk+gensub() or sed (very similar syntactically) might be the best options. Both of those can run into problems when trying to describe the negation of multi-char REs so then you need to look at gawk+patsplit() or gawk+FPAT. No silver bullet unfortunately.
for loop solution. fprintf $1 as that will fail spectacularly if your input data contains printf formatting characters such as %. Always use printf "%s",$1 for printing input data instead. Also to print a newline is just print "", no need for printf "\n".You can use simple awk like this:
awk '{$2=""}1' file However this will have an extra OFS in your output that can be avoided by this awk
awk '{sub($2 OFS, "")}1' file OR else by using this tr and cut combo:
On Linux:
tr -s ' ' < file | cut -d ' ' -f1,f3- On OSX:
tr -s ' ' < file | cut -d ' ' -f1 -f3- 
cut -d' ' -f1,3-.cut -f1,3- is not portable and isn't supported on my OSX.awk '{sub($2 OFS, "")}1' since the same text that's in $2 might be at the end of $1, and/or $2 might contain RE metacharacters so there's a very good chance that you'll remove the wrong string that way.This removes filed #2 and cleans up the extra space.
awk '{$2="";sub(" "," ")}1' file 1 do here?1 evaluates to true which kicks in the default block ({ print $0 }).
IFS (one or more in a row) into a single OFS. E.g. that is one way to implement a 'normalize spaces' filter: awk '{$1=$1}1'Another way is to just use sed to replace the first digits and space match:
sed 's|[0-9]\+\s\+||' file
Approach using awk that would not require gawk or any state mutations:
awk '{print $1 " " substr($0, index($0, $3));}' datafile UPD
solution that is a bit longer, but will stand up the case when $1 or $2 contains $3:
awk '{print $1 " " substr($0, length($1 $2) + 1);}' data Or even more robust if you have custom field separator:
awk '{print $1 " " substr($0, length($1 FS $2 FS) + 1);}' data Do not use altering $n. If you have more spaces in some part you want to keep, it will reduce to one.
