Printing everything except the first field with awk

Question

I have a file that looks like this:

AE  United Arab Emirates
AG  Antigua & Barbuda
AN  Netherlands Antilles
AS  American Samoa
BA  Bosnia and Herzegovina         


        

Answer 1

awk '{ tmp = $1; sub(/^[^ ]+ +/, ""); print $0, tmp }'

Answer 2

If you're open to a Perl solution...

perl -lane 'print join " ",@F[1..$#F,0]' file

is a simple solution with an input/output separator of one space, which produces:

United Arab Emirates AE
Antigua & Barbuda AG
Netherlands Antilles AN
American Samoa AS
Bosnia and Herzegovina BA
Burkina Faso BF
Brunei Darussalam BN

This next one is slightly more complex

perl -F`  ` -lane 'print join "  ",@F[1..$#F,0]' file

and assumes that the input/output separator is two spaces:

United Arab Emirates  AE
Antigua & Barbuda  AG
Netherlands Antilles  AN
American Samoa  AS
Bosnia and Herzegovina  BA
Burkina Faso  BF
Brunei Darussalam  BN

These command-line options are used:

• -n loop around every line of the input file, do not automatically print every line

• -l removes newlines before processing, and adds them back in afterwards

• -a autosplit mode – split input lines into the @F array. Defaults to splitting on whitespace

• -F autosplit modifier, in this example splits on ' ' (two spaces)

• -e execute the following perl code

@F is the array of words in each line, indexed starting with 0
$#F is the number of words in @F
@F[1..$#F] is an array slice of element 1 through the last element
@F[1..$#F,0] is an array slice of element 1 through the last element plus element 0

Answer 3

awk '{ saved = $1; $1 = ""; print substr($0, 2), saved }'

Setting the first field to "" leaves a single copy of OFS at the start of $0. Assuming that OFS is only a single character (by default, it's a single space), we can remove it with substr($0, 2). Then we append the saved copy of $1.

Answer 4

There's a sed option too...

 sed 's/\([^ ]*\)  \(.*\)/\2 \1/' inputfile.txt

Explained...

Swap
\([^ ]*\) = Match anything until we reach a space, store in $1
\(.*\)    = Match everything else, store in $2
With
\2        = Retrieve $2
\1        = Retrieve $1

More thoroughly explained...

s    = Swap
/    = Beginning of source pattern
\(   = start storing this value
[^ ] = text not matching the space character
*    = 0 or more of the previous pattern
\)   = stop storing this value
\(   = start storing this value
.    = any character
*    = 0 or more of the previous pattern
\)   = stop storing this value
/    = End of source pattern, beginning of replacement
\2   = Retrieve the 2nd stored value
\1   = Retrieve the 1st stored value
/    = end of replacement

Answer 5

Yet another way...

...this rejoins the fields 2 thru NF with the FS and outputs one line per line of input

awk '{for (i=2;i<=NF;i++){printf $i; if (i < NF) {printf FS};}printf RS}'

I use this with git to see what files have been modified in my working dir:

git diff| \
    grep '\-\-git'| \
    awk '{print$NF}'| \
    awk -F"/" '{for (i=2;i<=NF;i++){printf $i; if (i < NF) {printf FS};}printf RS}'

Answer 6

Another and easy way using cat command

cat filename | awk '{print $2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$1}' > newfilename