Question

I have a file like the following:

Header1:value1|value2|value3|
Header2:value4|value5|value6|

The column number is unknown and I have a function which can return the column number.

And I want to write a script which can remove one column from the file. For exampple, after removing column 1, I will get:

Header1:value2|value3|
Header2:value5|value6|

I use cut to achieve this and so far I can give the values after removing one column but without the headers. For example

value2|value3|
value5|value6|

Could anyone tell me how can I add headers back? Or any command can do that directly? Thanks.

Answer 1

Replace the colon with a pipe, do your cut command, then replace the first pipe with a colon again:

sed 's/:/|/' input.txt | cut ... | sed 's/|/:/'

You may need to adjust the column number for the cut command, to ensure you don’t count the header.