New to awk and need some help. I have a script that I would like to make more compact. I want to read a file and grab every field, from every record, except the last field. The records are variable length and have varying number of fields. A record will have at least two fields, but can have many more. Here is what I am currently using. Can someone provide a compact solution? Thanks.

awk '{ print $1 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $2 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $3 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $4 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $5 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $6 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $7 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $8 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $9 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt
awk '{ print $10 }' sftplist.txt >> users.txt

This gives me what I want, but then I have a lot of cleanup after it, like removing blank lines and lines that contained the last field when I didn't want the last field.

rev sftplist.txt | cut -f2- | rev > users.txt

Thanks for the suggestion, but your solution still provides me the last field of the record of which I have to cleanup from the file. It's not that big of a deal to perform the cleanup, I just like to keep my scripts as compact as possible and not perform unnecessary processing.

Any sample input and output?

Sure,
Anything to help.

Here is sftplist.txt

user3 user1 user2 /mydir/next/dir1
user2 /mydir/next/dir2
user1 user4 /staging/next/dir1


Output users.txt

user3
user1
user2
user2
user1
user4

Hope this helps. I can manage the sort -u afterwards.

rev sftplist.txt | cut -d' ' -f2- | rev | tr ' ' '\n' > users.txt

Here is what I have,

rev sftplist.txt | cut -d ' ' -f2- | rev | tr ' ' '\n' > users.txt

This is what I get.

tr: 0653-712 The combination of options and String parameters is not legal.
Usage: tr [ -[c|C] | -[c|C]ds | -[c|C]s | -ds | -s ] [-A] String1 String2
tr { -[c|C]d | -[c|C]s | -d | -s } [-A] String1