Using awk to print characters of specific index on a line

Question

Alright, so I know it is quite simple to print specific arguments of a line using $:

$ cat file
hello world

$ awk \'{print $1}\' file
hello

Answer 1

awk '{print substr($0,2,6)}' file

the syntax for substr() is

substr(string,start index,length)

Answer 2

Yes. You can use substr function :

http://www.starlink.rl.ac.uk/docs/sc4.htx/node38.html

In your case - for print chars from 2 through 8:

echo "hello" | awk '{ print substr( $0, 2, 6 ) }'

result is:

ello

Answer 3

If Perl is an option:

perl -lne 'print substr($_,1,6)' file

Output is identical to answer from @nims