Question: Git does not have a way to backup a working copy. (You can use git commit, but that pollutes your repo with backups.) So I use git diff, but it has an issue with Visual Studio 2010 (VS). Sometimes, VS saves C# files as UTF-8, sometimes UTF-16LE. When VS switches a file from one to the other, the git patch file says, "Binary files a/path1/file1.cs and b/path1/file1.cs differ," and git apply cannot restore from the patch file. What's the easiest solution?

Answer: 
```
$ awk -F' ?[^ ]+: ' '{print $2, $3, $4}' file
Dean 23 Chicago
Mary 68 New York
Lisa 36 Los angeles
Greg 18 London

```

or in general for any number of fields:

```
$ awk -F' ?[^ ]+: ' '{for (i=2;i<=NF;i++) printf "%s%s", $i, (i<NF?OFS:ORS)}' file
Dean 23 Chicago
Mary 68 New York
Lisa 36 Los angeles
Greg 18 London

```
Piling on the answer, with perl:

To remove the specific labels:

```
perl -pe 's/(?:name|age|hometown): *//ig' file

```

To remove any label:

```
perl -pe 's/\w+:\s*//ig' file

```

`tr` is not the right tool, because it maps *characters*, not words.