give column range in awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi all,

I generally give an awk command to print multiple columns like this:

awk -F~ '{OFS=",";print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8,$9,$10,$11,$12,$13}' test.txt

can't we give a range like :

awk -F~ '{OFS=",";print $1-$13}' 
( I know this will subtract column 13 from 1) 

or awk -F~ '{OFS=",";print $1 to $13}'

Thanks
Sumeet

2 
awk -F"|" '{ for (x=1; x<=2; x++) {  printf "%s\n", $x } }' file

>cat file
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi
ab|cd|ef|gh|fi