Originally Posted by landossa

Lets say I want to remove columns 2,3,4,5,10 and keep the rest

Normally, in a fixed length CSV, which has the same amount of columns every time it is processed, say 20 columns each time, I would use the following command to achieve this: (thereby specifying columns I do want)

cut -d"," -f 1,6,7,8,9,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20

But since the amount of columns will increase each time I have to run this process, then I need a means of specifying columns that I don't want (inverse cut) rather than what I do want. Perhaps this could be achieved in sed or awk..

Originally Posted by Chubler_XL

If your cut supports --complement then:

Code:

cut -d, --complement -f2-5,10 infile

Code:

awk -F, -vR="2,3,4,5,10" 'BEGIN{split(R,A,",");for(v in A) S[A[v]]=1}
{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)if(!(i in S)) printf $i " ";print ""}' infile

Code:

awk -F, -vR="2-5,10" '
BEGIN {
 split(R,A,",");
 for(v in A) if (split(A[v],V,"-") > 1)
 for(i=V[1];i<=V[2];i++)S[i]=1
 else S[V[1]]=1}
{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)if(!(i in S)) printf $i " ";print ""}' infile