How to delete input field in AWK?

Deleting fields in awk is notoriously difficult. It seems to be such a simple (and often required) operation but it's harder than it should be.

See Is there a way to completely delete fields in awk, so that extra delimiters do not print? from Stack Overflow for a good way to do this.

I've copied the rmcol() function in @ghoti's answer, so that we have a copy here on U&L:

function rmcol(col,     i) {
  for (i=col; i<NF; i++) {
    $i=$(i+1)
  }
  NF--
}

It deletes the specified column from the current input line and decrements the field counter (NF) to match.

I have no idea what your transform() function does, so I won't even attempt to duplicate that - but here's an example of using rmcol() in an awk one-liner:

$ echo 'field1,field2,field3' | awk -F, -v OFS=, '
  function rmcol(col,     i) {
    for (i=col; i<NF; i++) {
      $i=$(i+1)
    }
    NF--
  }

  { rmcol(2); print; }
  '
field1,field3

BTW, if you need to delete multiple fields from an input line, it is best/easiest to delete them in reverse order. That is, delete the highest-numbered fields first. Why? Because the higher-numbered fields will be renumbered every time you delete a lower-numbered field, making it very difficult to keep track of which field number belongs to which field.

---

BTW, delete() in awk is for deleting elements of an array - not for deleting fields from an input line. You could split() each input line (on FS) into an array and delete the 2nd array element, but then you'd have to write a join() function to print the array with a comma (or OFS) separating each field.

Even doing that would be more complicated than one would expect because all arrays in awk are associative arrays (i.e. they're not numerically indexed) - so delete(array[2]) won't automatically shift array elements 3+ into elements 2+. You'd have to write your own wrapper function around delete() to do pretty much the same thing for arrays that rmcol() does for input fields.

Some alternatives

1) pre-process the input to remove the field first, easy to do with cut if field separator is single character

$ s='field1,field2,field3'
$ # use 'cut -d, -f1,3-' if --complement option is not available
$ echo "$s" | cut -d, --complement -f2
field1,field3
$ echo "$s" | cut -d, --complement -f2 | awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","} {$1="new"} 1'
new,field3

2) use perl

$ # indexing starts from 0, the array @F contains the input fields
$ # $#F will give index of last element in the array
$ echo "$s" | perl -F, -lane '$F[0]="new"; print join ",", @F[0,2..$#F]'
new,field3