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deleting repetitive columns in unix

I would like to delete multiple repetitive columns from a huge file (about 1 million). The columns that I want to delete has the same column names: A and others has different unique name. Say:

A B2 A B3

1.1 AA 1.2 AA

2.1 AB 4.3 CT

2.2 AC 6.4 GT

so column headers are A, B2, A, B3,... . How could I delete the columns named as A's from the data.

Solution

  • Another in awk:

    $ awk '
NR==1 {
    split($0,a)
    for(i in a)
        if(a[i]=="A")
            delete a[i]
}
{
    for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)
        printf "%s",(i in a?$i OFS:"")
    printf ORS
}' file
B2 B3 
AA AA 
AB CT 
AC GT