CODEWITHSUNDEEP
awk
dan
dan

Reputation: 45622

Is there a concise way to get awk to print everything except the first field of a record?

I'd like to copy commands from my recent command history into a file, but the history looks like this:

568  find . -name "*.txt" -mtime -1 -print -exec awk '$9 != "" && NR <= 10' {} \;
569  find . -name "*.txt" -mtime -1 -print -exec awk '$9 != "" && n < 10 {print; n++}' {} \;
570  history 10

I want to strip off the numbers on the left. Is there a short way to do this in awk without explicitly using $2 $3 $4 etc. to output everything but the first field?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4218

Answers (4)

Dennis Williamson
Dennis Williamson

Reputation: 359955

If you don't mind using something other than awk:

history 10 | cut -c 8-

Upvotes: 3

Jamie
Jamie

Reputation: 2255

This is an alternative in awk which also preserves whitespace.

history | awk '{sub($1, "", $0); sub(/^[ \t]+/, "", $0); print}'

Note the sub defaults to $0 so you can ommit this.

history | awk '{sub($1, ""); sub(/^[ \t]+/, ""); print}'

Upvotes: 0

paxdiablo
paxdiablo

Reputation: 881253

If you're not adverse to using other tools, try sed, it will better preserve the spacing of the original file:

pax> cat qq.in
568  find . -name "*.txt" -mtime -1 -print -exec awk '$9 != "" && NR <= 10' {} \;
569  find . -name "*.txt" -mtime -1 -print -exec awk 'blah blah' {} \;
570  history 10

pax> cat qq.in | sed 's/^ *[^ ]* *//'
find . -name "*.txt" -mtime -1 -print -exec awk '$9 != "" && NR <= 10' {} \;
find . -name "*.txt" -mtime -1 -print -exec awk 'blah blah' {} \;
history 10

It basically strips off any leading spaces followed by any non-space characters, followed by space characters, effectively lopping off the first word in each line.

If the line format can be tied down to any number of digits at the start of the line followed by two spaces then the text you're interested in, you could improve the regex a little with (there's two spaces following the *):

sed 's/^[0-9]*  //'

Upvotes: 1

ghostdog74
ghostdog74

Reputation: 342323

if you don't mind the little space in front

awk '{$1="";print}' file

otherwise, do an extra sub/gsub to get rid of it. The other way is to use a for loop

awk '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i++) printf "%s " ,$i}' file

Borrowing from pax's solution, the awk version using regex (who says you need sed ) :)

awk '{gsub(/^ *[^ ]* */,"")}1' file

Upvotes: 4

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