Question

I have a formatted list of processes (top output) and I’d like to remove unnecessary information. How can I remove for example the second word+whitespace of each line.

Example:

1 a hello
2 b hi
3 c ahoi

Id like to delete a b and c.

Answer 1

You can use cut command.

 cut -d' ' -f2 --complement file

--complement does the inverse. i.e. with -f2 second field was choosen. And with --complement if prints all fields except the second. This is useful when you have variable number of fields.

GNU’s cut has the option --complement. In case, --complement is not available then, the following does the same:

cut -d’ ‘ -f1,3- file

Meaning: print first field and then print from 3rd to the end i.e. Excludes second field and prints the rest.
Edit:

If you prefer awk you can do: awk {$2=""; print $0}' file

This sets the second to empty and prints the whole line (one-by-one).