What is a unix command for deleting the first N characters of a line?

Question

For example, I might want to:

tail -f logfile | grep org.springframework | 

I was thinking that

Answer 1

I think awk would be the best tool for this as it can both filter and perform the necessary string manipulation functions on filtered lines:

tail -f logfile | awk '/org.springframework/ {print substr($0, 6)}'

or

tail -f logfile | awk '/org.springframework/ && sub(/^.{5}/,"",$0)'