How to remove the first column from all files and replace?

Question

I have several tab-delimited files, e.g. the file looks like this:

A213<TAB>foo bar<TAB>sentence
A123<TAB>bar foo<TAB>sentence
B84521<TAB>abc hello<TAB>world
C984<TAB>def word<TAB>hello

I need it to remove the first column and the substitute the tabs with |||, the output should look as such:

foo bar ||| sentence
bar foo ||| sentence
abc hello ||| world
def word ||| hello

I've tried the following but it didn't work:

$ cut -f2,3 file.txt | sed 's/<TAB>/\s|||\s/g'

Answer 1

This can make it:

$ awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t"; OFS=" ||| "} {print $2, $3}' file
foo bar ||| sentence
bar foo ||| sentence
abc hello ||| world
def word ||| hello

It is just a matter of defining the input and output field separators accordingly. Then, print second and third fields.

With cut + sed you could use:

$ cut -d$'\t' -f2- < file | sed 's/\t/|||/' 
foo bar|||sentence
bar foo|||sentence
abc hello|||world
def word|||hello

In all cases note you have to indicate what is the field separator.