Delete columns from space delimited file where file header matches

Question

I have a space delimited input text file. I would like to delete columns where the column header is size using sed or awk.

Input File:

id quantity colour         


        

Answer 1

If you have GNU cut available this can be done like so:

columns=$(head -n1 INPUT_FILE \
          | tr ' ' '\n'       \
          | cat -n            \
          | grep size         \
          | tr -s ' '         \
          | cut -f1           \
          | tr -d ' '         \
          | paste -sd ",")

cut --complement -d' ' -f$columns INPUT_FILE

Which generates a comma separated list based on the heading, and then cuts the complement of that list from INPUT_FILE.