I have a flat file file1.txt with fixed length fields. It is like this :

100<>JOHN <>ERERXC<>4343<>YMC
200<>MARK <>BNDF <>3434<>BNU
300<>SCOTT <>TRTRR <>4343<>JNI
400<>BENJAMIN <>VZDSS <>3434<>IJM

I want to remove the whole of the 3rd column above. In other words. my output needs
to be as below in another file called file2.txt

100<>JOHN <>4343<>YMC
200<>MARK <>3434<>BNU
300<>SCOTT <>4343<>JNI
400<>BENJAMIN <>3434<>IJM

How do I do this using awk ? Or is there another method ? Thanks

Use substr:

Code:

awk 'print substr($0,1,30) substr($0,41);}' file1.txt >file1.new

.