How would one go about deleting the first two characters on each line of a file on Unix? I thought about using awk, but cannot seem to find if it can explicitly do this. In this case there might or might not be a field separator. Meaning that the data might look like this.

01999999999
02999999999
09999999999

Regardless of what it looks like, on each line I want the first two characters deleted. I thought I would run it by the group here, I know I am probably missing something easy. Thanks in advance.

You can use sed like

sed 's/^..//g' FILE_NAME

Thanks so much, I need to brush up on my regex, I knew there was an easy way, just did not dawn on me at the time. Thanks again.

cut -c 3- filename > newfilename

awk '{ print substr($0,3) }' f1

Python alternative, no regexp

#!/usr/bin/python
for line in open("file"):
     print line[2:]