delete a column with awk or sed

Question

I have a file with three columns  I would like to delete the 3rd column in-place editing   How can I do this with awk or sed   123   abc  22 3 453   abg  56 7 1236  hjg  2 3   Desired output  123  abc 453  abg 1236 hjg

User · Answer

If you re open to a Perl solution    perl -ane  print  quot  F 0   F 1  n quot   file  These command-line options are used   -n loop around every line of the input file  do not automatically print every line  -a autosplit mode     split input lines into the  F array   Defaults to splitting on whitespace  -e execute the following perl code

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Try using cut    its fast and easy  First you have repeated spaces  you can squeeze those down to a single space between columns if thats what you want with tr -s      If each column already has just one delimiter between it  you can use cut -d     -f-2 to print fields  columns   lt   2   for example if your data is in a file input txt you can do one of the following   cat input txt   tr -s       cut -d     -f-2   Or if you better reason about this problem by removing the 3rd column you can write the following  cat input txt   tr -s       cut -d     --complement -f3   cut is pretty powerful  you can also extract ranges of bytes  or characters  in addition to columns  excerpt from the man page on the syntax of how to specify the list range  Each LIST is made up of one range  or many ranges separated by commas  Selected input is written in the same order that it is read  and is written exactly once  Each range is one of     N     N th byte  character or field  counted from 1   N-    from N th byte  character or field  to end of line   N-M   from N th to M th  included  byte  character or field   -M    from first to M th  included  byte  character or field   so you also could have said you want specific columns 1 and 2 with     cat input txt   tr -s       cut -d     -f1 2

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

try this short thing   awk     3      file

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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 Nth 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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Try this    awk   3    1  file txt  gt  new file  amp  amp  mv new file file txt   or  awk    3    print   file txt  gt  new file  amp  amp  mv new file file txt

User · Answer

GNU awk 4 1  awk -i inplace NF--   This will remove the last field of each line

[sed] delete a column with awk or sed

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