Question

I have a dataset with 119 columns separated by a space and like to select columns (3,7,11,…,47,51), (52,53,54,…,118,119) and print them out to another file. How can I do this using awk?

Input file 

c1 c2 c3...c119

Output file

c3 c7 c11 ... c51 c52 c53 c54 ... c118 c119 

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

awk '{for(i=3;i<=51;i+=4) printf "%s ",$i ;for(i=52;i<=119;i++) {printf "%s ",$i} ;print ""}' file