Keeping original format POST passing through AWK

Question

I have an issue with using AWK to simply remove a field from a stream, illustrated below:

  1 int blah (void)
  2 {
  3         if (foo) {
  4                 printf ("blah\n");
  5         }       
  6         return 0;
  7 }  

I use the following code to remove the first field:

$ awk '{ $1=""; print }' example.out

 int blah (void)
 {
 if (foo) {
 printf ("blah\n");
 }
 return 0;
 }

Why is this the case? Is this because AWK removes all whitespace - can this be prevented?

Answer 1

http://awk.freeshell.org/RangeOfFields

Contains a description how to do it. It also links to http://student.northpark.edu/pemente/awk/awktail.txt which contains 3 solutions to the problem. As far as i know, if you assign to a field, then the output field separator is used to concatenate all fields together. So " "+ suddendly is collapsed to one space. Take it with a grain of salt though, i'm no awk expert. For example, try assigning : to the variable OFS, and colons instead of spaces will result in between fields in the output:

echo a b c | awk 'BEGIN{ OFS = ":" } { $1=""; print }'
$ :b:c

If you use gawk, then you can use its gensub extension which i find pretty straight forward to use:

print gensub($1 "[\t ]*(.*)", "\\1", 1);