awk question

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi
I was just wondering ... what is the most simple and/or efficient way you suggest in awk, to "shift" fields to left ?

(let's say we are not interested by the N first field but we want to print all N+1 and more fields , until the end of line)

Of course i want to get rid off any potential leading FS (those at beginning of line)

2

One way to remove the first 3 fields:

awk '{sub(".*" $3 FS,"")}1' file
1 Like
3

awk lack that shift command :slight_smile:

4

Alas, no shift operator in AWK :slight_smile:

5

Yep, cruel lack of that shift thing
I was dreaming about a "kind of" work around like

$0=system (set -- $0 ; shift 3 )

but this will of course also fail ... grrrrr :smiley:

6

Yep , I think sub is the best option. Sub alternative:

awk 'sub(".*"$4,$4)'
7

A bit longer but should shift and clear FS in beginning of line (start at field 2)

#!/bin/ksh
cat <file name>  | awk '{
  ct=split($0,a)
  ftime=1
  for(x=2;x<ct;x++){
    if(ftime == 1){
      out_val=a[x]
      ftime=0
    }else{
      out_val=out_val " " a[x]
    }
  }
  printf("%s\n",out_val)
}'