Printing everything except the first field with awk

Question

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         


        

Answer 1

If you're open to a Perl solution...

perl -lane 'print join " ",@F[1..$#F,0]' file

is a simple solution with an input/output separator of one space, which produces:

United Arab Emirates AE
Antigua & Barbuda AG
Netherlands Antilles AN
American Samoa AS
Bosnia and Herzegovina BA
Burkina Faso BF
Brunei Darussalam BN

This next one is slightly more complex

perl -F`  ` -lane 'print join "  ",@F[1..$#F,0]' file

and assumes that the input/output separator is two spaces:

United Arab Emirates  AE
Antigua & Barbuda  AG
Netherlands Antilles  AN
American Samoa  AS
Bosnia and Herzegovina  BA
Burkina Faso  BF
Brunei Darussalam  BN

These command-line options are used:

• -n loop around every line of the input file, do not automatically print every line

• -l removes newlines before processing, and adds them back in afterwards

• -a autosplit mode – split input lines into the @F array. Defaults to splitting on whitespace

• -F autosplit modifier, in this example splits on ' ' (two spaces)

• -e execute the following perl code

@F is the array of words in each line, indexed starting with 0
$#F is the number of words in @F
@F[1..$#F] is an array slice of element 1 through the last element
@F[1..$#F,0] is an array slice of element 1 through the last element plus element 0