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need help with awk in printing the fields in a file

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# 1  
Old 10-06-2008
need help with awk in printing the fields in a file
hi all

i get a file from a server and i do not know how many fields that file will contain.
i need to cut from the second column of the file to the last, irrespective of how many fields are there.

is there any way to make the awk command dynamic for fetching from the second to the last field in the file, some thing similar to cut commmand where giving -f2- will give fields from second to the end..
the reason why i cannot use cut is that a few of the fields have tab as a delimiter and a few have space, as awk treats both as same and fetches the field irrespective of the delimiter being tab or space, i want it to be an awk command...

any help.
# 2  
Old 10-06-2008

Code:
awk '{sub( /^[^ \t]+[ \t]+/,""); print}' FILENAME

# 3  
Old 10-07-2008
thank you very much ...... one more help ..can you please explain the command ?
# 4  
Old 10-07-2008
i am getting the following error. can you please help?

> awk '{sub( /^[^ \t]+[ \t]+/,""); print}' 21CP
+ awk {sub( /^[^ \t]+[ \t]+/,""); print} 21CP
awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: illegal statement near line 1
# 5  
Old 10-07-2008
Quote:
Originally Posted by sais
i am getting the following error. can you please help?

> awk '{sub( /^[^ \t]+[ \t]+/,""); print}' 21CP
+ awk {sub( /^[^ \t]+[ \t]+/,""); print} 21CP
awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: illegal statement near line 1
Use nawk or /usr/xpg4/bin/awk on Solaris.

Quote:
Originally Posted by sais
can you please explain the command ?
Code:
sub(/^[^ \t]+[ \t]+/,"")

The sub command replaces the first field and the tabs or spaces after the first field with nothing ("").

^[^ \t]+ -> select one or more non spaces/tabs from the begin of the line

[ \t]+ -> select one or more spaces/tabs after the characters of the begin of the line

Regards
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