Question

I am using awk in shell script and it is working as expected.

awk -F'^' 'BEGIN {OFS="^"} {print $1,$2,$3,$4,$5}'

When I need to change the number of columns, I simply change the print statement by adding $6,$7,$8

Is there a way to declare it in a variable and use that variable in awk?

columns=8
awk -F'^' 'BEGIN {OFS="^"} {print $1..$columns}'

Answer 1

You could always use a for-loop

 {for(i=1;i<=columns;i++)printf("%s ", $i);print '\n'}'

using printf and the print after the loop will give you the linefeed at the end of the line.