Shell Programming and Scripting

Thanks Shamrock, I'm getting closer!

My problem now is column 1 and 2 are separated by a space! If only I could use your solution and separate 1 and 2 as well and I'll be sorted.

I'll keep digging.

Thanks for all of your help

Note: not every awk understands the {,} repetition operators, out of the box. mawk does not know them and gawk 3 needs an option to switch them on (--re-interval or --posix). An alternative would be to alternatively use two spaces followed by a + operator.
If we combine that with alternation ( | ), we get:

Code:

awk -F '  +|\t' '{print $2, $3, $4}' file

which, combined with the input from post #3 gives:

Code:

Col2 Col3 Col4
  
host2 OFFLINE host2 is offline and has been for 7 minutes
host1 ONLINE host1 is online

--edit--
If the separator between the first two fields is a single space you could add and exception like this:

Code:

awk -F '  +|\t' '{split($1,F,/[ ]/); print F[2], $2, $3}' file

Another option could be to get the columns based on spacing, rather than character delimited. For example, in your example data above, you could print the 1st & 4th column like such:

Code:

perl -lne '@m = /(.{14})(.{12})(.{14})(.*)/; print $m[0].$m[3]' file

In that case you'd have split up $1 into its sub-fields...

Code:

awk -F"  +" '{printf("%s %s %s\n", a[split($1, a, " ")], $2, $5)}' file