delete a column with awk or sed

Solution 1:

try this short thing:

awk '!($3="")' file

Solution 2:

With GNU awk for inplace editing, \s/\S, and gensub() to delete

1) the FIRST field:

awk -i inplace '{sub(/^\S+\s*/,"")}1' file

or

awk -i inplace '{$0=gensub(/^\S+\s*/,"",1)}1' file

2) the LAST field:

awk -i inplace '{sub(/\s*\S+$/,"")}1' file

or

awk -i inplace '{$0=gensub(/\s*\S+$/,"",1)}1' file

3) the N^th field where N=3:

awk -i inplace '{$0=gensub(/\s*\S+/,"",3)}1' file

Without GNU awk you need a match()+substr() combo or multiple sub()s + vars to remove a middle field. See also Print all but the first three columns.

Solution 3:

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed -i -r 's/\S+//3' file

If you want to delete the white space before the 3rd field:

sed -i -r 's/(\s+)?\S+//3' file

Solution 4:

It seems you could simply go with

awk '{print $1 " " $2}' file

This prints the two first fields of each line in your input file, separated with a space.