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

The only way I can think to do it in Awk without using a loop is to use gsub on $0 to combine adjacent FS:

$ echo {1..10} | awk '{$2=$3=""; gsub(FS"+",FS); print}'
1 4 5 6 7 8 9 10