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

You can't delete fields in the middle, but you can delete fields at the end, by decrementing NF.

So you can shift all the later fields down to overwrite $2 and $3 then decrement NF by two, which erases the last two fields:

$ echo 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | awk '{for(i=2; i