Awk: remove first few fields from CSV

Question

I'm using this command to get my output in csv.

awk 'ORS="," {print $2}'

I get the output in the following format:

a,b,c,name,col1,col2,col3,

Here I would like to delete 'name' and everything before 'name' and get only the column names. Note that column names can have the work 'name' too, which I donot want to delete. So I am okay with only deleting the first occurrence of name. Can this be done with awk?

I have tried:

awk 'NR >4 {print $2}' | awk '{ORS=","}'

and various combinations, none of which worked.

Answer 1

If a,b,c,name,col1,col2,col3, are the second fields of each line in the original, then you could do the test against name at the same time you pick out these (this still leaves the annoying final comma):

$ awk -vORS=, 'p {print $2}; $2 == "name" {p=1} ' input; echo
col1,col2,col3,

So, starting with what you had (awk 'ORS="," {print $2}'), we add a test variable p that tells if name has already been seen. We print the second field only if p has been set to a true value earlier, and set it to true if the second field happens to be name. With the tests in this order, the name column itself is not printed. We could also ignore empty lines in input by changing p {print $2} to $0 && p {print $2}, that is, make a truthy (nonempty) input line a condition for the print, along with p.

I assumed here that the original input looks like this:

x a
x b
x c
x name
x col1
x col2
x col3

Alternatively, starting from the comma-separated list a,b,c,name,somename,othername,col3,:

$ echo 'a,b,c,name,somename,othername,col3,' | 
    sed -e 's/.*,name,//' -e s'/,$//'
somename,othername,col3

Note the commas on both sides of ,name, in the pattern, they keep the greedy .* from catching the later names that end in ...name.

Answer 2

Assuming file contents as below:

$ cat myfile
a,b,c,name,col1,col2,col3,forename,surname,name5,foo,name,name6
$ 

awk solution

$ awk -F',name,' '{print substr($0,index($0,$2))}' myfile
col1,col2,col3,forename,surname,name5,foo,name,name6
$

perl solution.

$ perl -pe 's/^.*?name,//' myfile
col1,col2,col3,forename,surname,name5,foo,name,name6
$