How can I remove repeated lines taking into consideration the text from just a column?

Question

I have the following file:

ICR1 +
ICR1+1+3199 +
ICR1+2526+2828 +
IRT1 +
IRT1+1+1489 +
IRT1+713+937 +
LSR1 -
LSR1+1+1175 -
LSR1+366+638 -
NME1 +
NME1+1+340 +
NME1+2+118 +
PWR1 -
PWR1+1+941 -
PWR1+724+939 -
Q0017 -
Q0017+1+162 -
Q0020 -
Q0020+1370+1513 -
Q0020+1+440 -

The first and second columns are tab-separated. I do need to have the following:

ICR1 +
IRT1 +
LSR1 -
NME1 +
PWR1 -
Q0017 -
Q0020 -

I've tried to use awk with the field separator "+" but it erased the + from the second column as well...

Answer 1

You can set awk's field separator to whitespace or +, and then do the classic associative array based de-duplication:

$ awk -F'[ \t+]' '!seen[$1]++' file
ICR1 +
IRT1 +
LSR1 -
NME1 +
PWR1 -
Q0017 -
Q0020 -

Answer 2

Maybe I've misunderstood the problem, but this seems to work:

grep -v '+.' file

Output:

ICR1 +
IRT1 +
LSR1 -
NME1 +
PWR1 -
Q0017 -
Q0020 -

Answer 3

I have achieved same by using sed command

sed -n '/^.\{1,5\} .$/p' filename

output

ICR1 +
IRT1 +
LSR1 -
NME1 +
PWR1 -
Q0017 -
Q0020 -

Answer 4

Using Miller:

mlr --tsv --implicit-csv-header --headerless-csv-output \
    put -S '$1=gsub($1,"[+].+$","")' then uniq -a inputfile

and the output is:

ICR1    +
IRT1    +
LSR1    -
NME1    +
PWR1    -
Q0017   -
Q0020   -