Hello cmccabe,

If I am not wrong code would have given for TAB delimited Input_file only as you could see we are setting it in BEGINsection, so how it will read the fields correctly if there are NO TABS in Input_file. So with space why it will NOT work out because let's have an example of following line 1 2 3 4 5 6. So let's run the code with a TAB delimited field separator first as follows.

Code:

echo "1              2 3 4 5   6" | awk -F"\t" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){print i "---->" $i}}'
1---->1              2 3 4 5   6

See as there is NO TAB present in line so it is printing whole line as a single field.
Now let's test it without setting TAB delimiter as follows.

Code:

echo "1              2 3 4 5   6" | awk  '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){print i"-->"$i}}'
1-->1
2-->2
3-->3
4-->4
5-->5
6-->6

So in above outputs left side of digits before -->shows the number of field and after arrow it shows the field's value. So one thing you could try here, if none of your fields into Input_file have space in their values that you could substitute space with TAB and then try to run above code. As a hint you could use gsub(/ +/,"\t",$0)utility of awk for doing so.

Kindly try it and do let us know how it goes then.

Thanks,
R. Singh