Here’s a long-standing question of mine for which I can’t find a satisfying solution.

Let’s say that you have a file for which contains N whitespace-delimited columns and an additional column which have spaces in it that you want to keep.

Example with N = 2:

1.1 1.2 data for row1
  2.1   2.2    data   for    row2
?  ?   data   for   row3
  * data for   row4

I would like to output:

data for row1
data   for    row2
data   for   row3
data for   row4

In the shell you can do it easily with:

while read -r _ _ data
do
    printf "%sb" "$data"
done < data.txt

But with awk it’s kind of difficult? Is there a method in awk for splitting only the first N columns?