Printing everything except the first field with awk

Assigning $1 works but it will leave a leading space: awk '{first = $1; $1 = ""; print $0, first; }'

You can also find the number of columns in NF and use that in a loop.

$1="" leaves a space as Ben Jackson mentioned, so use a for loop:

awk '{for (i=2; i<=NF; i++) print $i}' filename

So if your string was "one two three", the output will be:

two
three

If you want the result in one row, you could do as follows:

awk '{for (i=2; i<NF; i++) printf $i " "; print $NF}' filename

This will give you: "two three"

Maybe the most concise way:

$ awk '{$(NF+1)=$1;$1=""}sub(FS,"")' infile
United Arab Emirates AE
Antigua & Barbuda AG
Netherlands Antilles AN
American Samoa AS
Bosnia and Herzegovina BA
Burkina Faso BF
Brunei Darussalam BN

Explanation:

$(NF+1)=$1: Generator of a "new" last field.

$1="": Set the original first field to null

sub(FS,""): After the first two actions {$(NF+1)=$1;$1=""} get rid of the first field separator by using sub. The final print is implicit.

Use the cut command with -f 2- (POSIX) or --complement (not POSIX):

$ echo a b c | cut -f 2- -d ' '
b c
$ echo a b c | cut -f 1 -d ' '
a
$ echo a b c | cut -f 1,2 -d ' '
a b
$ echo a b c | cut -f 1 -d ' ' --complement
b c