I have a file that looks like this:
AE United Arab Emirates AG Antigua & Barbuda AN Netherlands Antilles AS American Samoa BA Bosnia and Herzegovina
Assigning $1 works but it will leave a leading space: awk '{first = $1; $1 = ""; print $0, first; }'
$1
awk '{first = $1; $1 = ""; print $0, first; }'
You can also find the number of columns in NF and use that in a loop.
NF