Removing First Column from Text File with awk

Question

I have the next text file:

Article_Title                                                                            1st_Author   Publication_Year    Language   Citations

Über die Theorie des Stoßes zwischen Atomen und elektrisch geladenen Teilchen            Fermi        1924                German     54
Zur Quantelung des idealen einatomigen Gases                                             Fermi        1926                German     333 
Eine statistische Methode zur Bestimmung einiger Eigenschaften des Atoms und ihre 
Anwendung auf die Theorie des periodi schen Systems der Elemente                         Fermi        1928                German     1833
Über die magnetischen Momente der Atomkerne                                              Fermi        1929                German     795
Über das Intensitätsverhältnis der Dublettkomponenten der Alkalien                       Fermi        1929                German     134
Über den Ramaneffekt des Kohlendioxyds                                                   Fermi        1931                German     594
Quantum Theory of Radiation                                                              Fermi        1932                English    951
Zur Theorie der Hyperfeinstruktur                                                        Fermi        1933                German     280
Possible Production of Elements of Atomic Number Higher than 92                          Fermi        1934                English    175
Versuch einer Theorie der β-Strahlen                                                     Fermi        1934                German     525
Sopra lo Spostamento per Pressione delle Righe Elevate delle Serie Spettrali             Fermi        1934                Italian    901
Tentativo di una Teoria Dei Raggi β                                                      Fermi        1934                Italian    475
On the Absorption and the Diffusion of Slow Neutrons                                     Almadi       1936                English    199
The Ionization Loss of Energy in Gases and in Condensed Materials                        Fermi        1940                English    710
The Capture of Negative Mesotrons in Matter                                              Fermi        1947                English    1156
Interference Phenomena of Slow Neutrons                                                  Fermi        1947                English    301
On the Origin of the Cosmic Radiation                                                    Fermi        1949                English    3309
Are Mesons Elementary Particles?                                                         Fermi        1949                English    498
Angular Distribution of the Pions Produced in High Energy Nuclear Collisions             Fermi        1951                English    324
Multiple Production of Pions in Nucleon-Nucleon Collisions at Cosmotron Energies         Fermi        1953                English    118

The first Column is the Scientific Article name, the second one is the Last Name of the Author, the third one is the Publication year, the fourth one the article language and the fifth one is the number of citations ..

I would like to convert it into something like this:

So, I need to remove the first column, the second and the fourth one

The Problem is the column of Article_Titles ... If the Article titles were like this:

Quantum_Theory_of_Radiation

I just need to run the next command:

sed -i '1,2d' plotting_data.txt  # Removing First and second Line 
awk '{$1=$2=$4=""; print $0}' plotting_data.txt > tmp && mv tmp plotting_data.txt # Removing First, Second and Fourth Column

The problem is that there are spaces between the words of the Article Titles .. I don't know how to tell awk or sed to remove that column .. could you help me?

I am using the next awk version:

compiled limits: max NF 32767 sprintf buffer 2040

and also the white space between fields is all blank chars

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Ed Morton Ed Morton · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-29T23:45:00

Assuming the white space in your sample is all blank chars this will work using any awk in any shell on any UNIX box:

$ awk 'NR==1{beg=index($0,$2)} NR>2{$0=substr($0,beg); print $2, $4}' file
1924 54
1926 333

1928 1833
1929 795
1929 134
1931 594
1932 951
1933 280
1934 175
1934 525
1934 901
1934 475
1936 199
1940 710
1947 1156
1947 301
1949 3309
1949 498
1951 324
1953 118

Removing First Column from Text File with awk

1 Answers