Often you may want to use awk to print all fields except the first field in a file.
You can use the following syntax to do so:
awk '{for (i=2; i<NF; i++) printf $i " "; print $NF}' player_stats.txt
This particular example prints all fields except for the first field of the text file named player_stats.txt.
Note that this syntax uses a for loop to print each column in the file ranging from column 2 to column NF, which stands for “number of fields” and extracts the last field in a file.
By using this approach, we’re able to print all fields except the first field in a file.
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: Use awk to Print All Fields Except First Field
Suppose we have the following text file named player_stats.txt that contains information about statistics for various basketball players:
Suppose that we would like to print all fields from this file except for the first (“team”) field.
We can use the following syntax to do so:
awk '{for (i=2; i<NF; i++) printf $i " "; print $NF}' player_stats.txt
The following screenshot shows how to use this syntax in practice:
Notice that this prints all fields in the file except for the first field.
Related Tutorials
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in awk:
How to Use awk to Replace newline with Space
How to Use awk to Replace All Occurrences of String in File
How to Use awk to Extract Substring
