Search Results

$ awk '{print NF == 3 ? $2 OFS $3 : $2}' FS=":" OFS=":" file
OR
$ awk '{$0 = NF == 3 ? $2 OFS $3 : $2}1' FS=":" OFS=":" file

1002 ZN:VTJ3J3C131
1002 ZN:VTM4M4P123%5
1002 ZN:VTM3M3P132%5...

Another formatting trick

{
sep=""
for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)
if (i != m && i != n) {
printf sep"%s", $i
sep=OFS
}
print ""
}

These suggestions should not be trusted for a moment. Blindly treating literal text data as regular expressions is asking for trouble. Both sub($a FS, x) and sub($(b-1) FS, x) are problematic in...

aliester is correct.
This can be cleaned by
awk '{$a=$b="";gsub(FS "+",FS)} 1' a=$m b=$n df_test_removing_column

This should do it
awk -F, '{$a=$b="";gsub(FS "+",FS)} 1' a=$m b=$n OFS=, df_test_removing_column

awk '{$a="";$b=""} 1' a=$m b=$n

ran:/home/vbe/wks $ ksh001 -f -t
ksh001:usage: [-f file] | [-d directory]
ran:/home/vbe/wks $ ksh001 -f -titi.txt
File name is -titi.txt
ran:/home/vbe/wks $
Solution:
-? )
echo...

With the sample input you've given, the following works. But it makes lots of assumptions and you haven't given a real specification of the input file format so it could go horribly wrong with...