Is there a way to completely delete fields in awk, so that extra delimiters do not print?

Question

Consider the following command:

$ gawk -F"\\t" "BEGIN{OFS=\\"\\t\\"}{$2=$3=\\"\\"; p         


        

Answer 1

This is an oldie but goodie.

As Jonathan points out, you can't delete fields in the middle, but you can replace their contents with the contents of other fields. And you can make a reusable function to handle the deletion for you.

$ cat test.awk
function rmcol(col,     i) {
  for (i=col; i