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

The field separator in gawk (at least) can be a string as well as a character (it can also be a regex). If your data is consistent, then this will work:

awk -F "  " '{print $2,$1}' inputfile

That's two spaces between the double quotes.