[chaps]

Oh dang, that's good.

[shawn_w]

As long as you don't mind the extra space in the middle.

[chaps]

Often times I don't! Entirely depends on what I'm doing. #1 thing off the top of my head is to remove That One Column that's a bajillion characters long that makes exploratory analysis difficult.

[saghm]

I wonder if it's possible to encode the backspace character in the replacement string?

[ZoomZoomZoom]

No problem, there's \b.

  echo "one two three four five" | awk '{$3="\b"; print}'

Inserts the backspace character (^H), which you can then remove with [global] substitution:

  awk '{$3="\b"; sub(/\32\b/, ""); print}'

You can, of course, use an arbitrary sentinel value for the field to be deleted. Should work in gawk and BWK awk.

[fragmede]

if you do:

    sed 's/  / /g'

[lucb1e]

Or sticking with awk, I have this bash alias to remove excess whitespace that is just:

    awk '{$1=$1};1'

[fuzztester]

what does the 1 at the end do? make awk print all lines? I'm a bit rusty with my awk.

[thrwwy9234]

It’s a condition. 1 is true-ish, so it’s a condition that is always true. The default action in awk is print, so it’s the same as:

  '{$1=$1}1{print}'

Or the same as

  '{$1=$1}{print}'

Since the default condition is true. But 1 is shorter than {print}.