Using awk to print all columns from the nth to the

Question

This line worked until I had whitespace in the second field.

svn status | grep '\!' | gawk '{print $2;}' > removedProjs

is there a way to have awk print everything in $2 or greater? ($3, $4.. until we don't have anymore columns?)

I suppose I should add that I'm doing this in a Windows environment with Cygwin.

Answer 1

I personally tried all the answers mentioned above, but most of them were a bit complex or just not right. The easiest way to do it from my point of view is:

awk -F" " '{ for (i=4; i<=NF; i++) print $i }'

1. Where -F" " defines the delimiter for awk to use. In my case is the whitespace, which is also the default delimiter for awk. This means that -F" " can be ignored.

2. Where NF defines the total number of fields/columns. Therefore the loop will begin from the 4th field up to the last field/column.

3. Where $N retrieves the value of the Nth field. Therefore print $i will print the current field/column based based on the loop count.

Answer 2

Perl:

@m=`ls -ltr dir | grep ^d | awk '{print \$6,\$7,\$8,\$9}'`;
foreach $i (@m)
{
        print "$i\n";

}

Answer 3

You could use a for-loop to loop through printing fields $2 through $NF (built-in variable that represents the number of fields on the line).

Edit: Since "print" appends a newline, you'll want to buffer the results:

awk '{out=""; for(i=2;i<=NF;i++){out=out" "$i}; print out}'

Alternatively, use printf:

awk '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i++){printf "%s ", $i}; printf "\n"}'

Answer 4

awk '{ for(i=3; i<=NF; ++i) printf $i""FS; print "" }'

lauhub proposed this correct, simple and fast solution here

Answer 5

This is what I preferred from all the recommendations:

Printing from the 6th to last column.

ls -lthr | awk '{out=$6; for(i=7;i<=NF;i++){out=out" "$i}; print out}'

or

ls -lthr | awk '{ORS=" "; for(i=6;i<=NF;i++) print $i;print "\n"}'

Answer 6

If you need specific columns printed with arbitrary delimeter:

awk '{print $3 "  " $4}'

col#3 col#4

awk '{print $3 "anything" $4}'

col#3anythingcol#4

So if you have whitespace in a column it will be two columns, but you can connect it with any delimiter or without it.