Question

I have a space delimited input text file. I would like to delete columns where the column header is size using sed or awk.

Input File:

id quantity colour shape size colour shape size colour shape size
1 10 blue square 10 red triangle 8 pink circle 3
2 12 yellow pentagon 3 orange rectangle 9 purple oval 6

Desired Output:

id quantity colour shape colour shape colour shape
1 10 blue square red triangle pink circle
2 12 yellow pentagon orange rectangle purple oval

Answer 1

awk command

awk '
NR==1{
    for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)
        if($i!="size")
            cols[i]
}
{
    for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)
        if(i in cols)
            printf "%s ",$i
    printf "\n"
}' input > output

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pretty printing

column -t -s ' ' output 

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result

id  quantity  colour  shape     colour  shape      colour  shape
1   10        blue    square    red     triangle   pink    circle
2   12        yellow  pentagon  orange  rectangle  purple  oval