Question

Using awk I want to get columns starting with /acq/old/*.

file1

z y x / ACQ / old / a.zip y
z y t / ACQ / old / a.zip x

The fourth column

file2

z y / ACQ / old / a.zip 10
z y / ACQ / old / a.zip 20

the third column

…

file n

z y w t / ACQ / old / x.zip 100
z y f r / ACQ / old / w.zip 200

The fifth column

I want to do following an operation.

for myfile in ls *. txt
do
  awk '??' $ myfile
  other processes
done

Answer 1

You can use sed to get rid of leading columns:

sed 's@^[^/]*@@' input

This is awk solution:

awk -F/ -vOFS=/ '{$1=""}1' input