Question

(Almost exact duplicate of Keeping original format POST passing through AWK submitted by same person.)

I have a simple question pertaining to gawk, illustrated below:

  1 int blah (void)   2 {   3         if (foo) {   4                 printf ("blah\n");   5         }          6         return 0;   7 }   

Using the following gawk code – using gensub() to maintain original formatting:

 gawk '{ print gensub($1, "\t", 1) }' ./sample_code.out       int blah (void)      {              if (foo) {                      printf ("blah\n");              }                     return 0;      }   

How can I use gawk or awk (maybe with regular expressions) to remove previous whitespace before field $1 (^)

Illustrated below:

 int blah (void)  {          if (foo) {                  printf ("blah\n");          }                 return 0;  }   

Answer 1

This works, but in the knowledge that you’ll always want to strip 3 spaces.

 vinko@parrot:~$ cat foo.c   1 int blah (void)   2 {   3         if (foo) {   4                 printf ('blah\n');   5         }   6         return 0;   7 }  vinko@parrot:~$ gawk '{ print gensub(/^   /,'',1,gensub($1, '', 1)) }' foo.c     int blah (void) {         if (foo) {                 printf ('blah\n');         }         return 0; }