== An irritating _awk_ limitation: getting a range of fields

Writing things in _awk_ has a number of little irritations that come up
every so often. One of them is that it has no built in way to retrieve
a range of input fields as a string, ie there is no equivalent of what
in Python one could write as something like '_r = " ".join(input[2:])_'
(which turns everything from the third field onwards back into a single
string).

Of course, you can do this with an awk function. But it's irritating to
have to keep including that function in my _awk_ programs (especially
when they are tiny programs that are written inline in a larger shell
script), and it points out a deeper weakness in _awk_, which is that
_awk_ has no really good way to manipulate how lines are split into
fields.

Take the example from [[yesterday ../unix/ForcingSortOrder]] and
consider the _sed_ invocation, which only exists because of this _awk_
issue.  What we really want to do is split each line into two fields:
the first word of the line, and then everything else; then we will print
the second field and ignore the first one. However, you can't do this in
_awk_ (or at least not very easily).

(To beat people to the obvious approach: yes, you can assign an empty
string to _$1_ and then use _$0_, but that puts a space at the front of
the new _$0_, which is sometimes important.)

=== Sidebar: the necessary awk function

Here's the necessary awk function:

>  function fieldstr(s, e,   i, r) {
>      if (e > NF) e = NF
>      r = $(s)
>      for (i = s+1; i <= e; i++)
>          r = r " " $(i)
>      return r
>  }

With no error checking, you can make this a sensible one-liner function
body without being too offensive. (In my version I put the '_return r_'
on a second line because otherwise it looked too crammed in.)