cut from column X until the end of a tab delimited file

Question

If I have a file with an unknown number of column but I know I want columns X til the end, is there an easy way to use cut for this?

Let us say X=5,

I used, cut -f5- filename but it did not work.

Then I am trying to specify the -d'\t' and also it does not work.

Not sure what I am doing wrong.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

thanks!

Solution 1

You're very close, but you're missing the dollar sign in there:

cut -d $'\t' -f5- file.txt

Solution 2

Not sure how to do it with cut but what I'd do if I had to print the fields from X to the end would be to use awk. Assume X = 2:

awk '{print $(NF - 2), $(NF - 1), $NF}' <<< "1 2 3 4 5 6" 

which results in:

4 5 6

NF is an awk reserved keyword that is a count of the number of fields.