Discard first column without AWK

UPDATE: Major derp moment on my part, thinking that you needed a loop in AWK to print all but one fields. Commandlinefu just cause a forehead-slapping moment when I saw this in my feed:

So, it seems AWK wins again. Carry on.

If you’re trying to print one or more particular columns from some input it is quite straightforward with AWK. You’d simply specify the variable(s) you know exist from the input (e.g.,

). However, it’s pretty AWKward (sorry) to omit one column of data and to print the rest, particularly if you don’t know exactly how many columns of input are expected on each line. Then you’d need to actually program a loop in AWK. Ugh.

I found a great tip for omitting the first column of data at commandlinefu. The code there is

. I didn’t know about the squeeze option (tr -s, combining multiple repeated characters into one) until I read this.