awk to print all columns from the nth to the last with spaces

Question

I have the following input file:

a 1  o p
b  2 o p p
c     3 o p p  p

in the last line there is a double space between the last p\'s

Answer 1

Since you want to preserve spaces, let's just use cut:

$ cut -d' ' -f2- file
1 o p
2 o p p
3 o p p  p

Or for example to start by column 4:

$ cut -d' ' -f4- file
p
p p
p p  p

This will work as long as the columns you are removing are one-space separated.

---

If the columns you are removing also contain different amount of spaces, you can use the beautiful solution by Ed Morton in Print all but the first three columns:

awk '{sub(/[[:space:]]*([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+){1}/,"")}1'
                                                   ^
                                        number of cols to remove

Test

$ cat a
a 1 o p
b    2 o p p
c  3 o p p  p
$ awk '{sub(/[[:space:]]*([^[:space:]]+[[:space:]]+){2}/,"")}1' a
o p
o p p
o p p  p