bash: shortest way to get n-th column of output

You can use cut to access the second field:

cut -f2

Edit: Sorry, didn't realise that SVN doesn't use tabs in its output, so that's a bit useless. You can tailor cut to the output but it's a bit fragile - something like cut -c 10- would work, but the exact value will depend on your setup.

Another option is something like: sed 's/.\s\+//'

To accomplish the same thing as:

svn st | awk '{print $2}' | xargs rm

using only bash you can use:

svn st | while read a b; do rm "$b"; done

Granted, it's not shorter, but it's a bit more efficient and it handles whitespace in your filenames correctly.