Question: I wish to delete one column of my data in awk but what I found is using command like $column\_A="". Is column\_A really deleted in this way?

For example, I wish to delete the second column and I found a solution: `awk 'BEGIN{FS="\t";OFS="\t"}!($2="")'` which print the result like: `$1^0^0$3`. It seems that it is the **content of** the second column is deleted but the second column.

Answer: 
after reading dev-null's comment, I got idea what are you asking...

My answer is: it depends on how do you define "a column is deleted".

see this example:

```
kent$  echo "foo,bar,blah"|awk -F, -v OFS="," '{$2="";print}'
foo,,blah

kent$  echo "foo,bar,blah"|awk -F, -v OFS="," '{print $1,$3}'
foo,blah

```

You see the difference? If you set the `$x=""` The column is still there, but it becomes an empty string. So the `FS` before and after stay. If this is what you wanted, it is fine. Otherwise just skip outputing the target column, like the 2nd example shows.
I would use `cut` for that:

```
cut -d$'\t' -f1,3- file

```

`-f1,3-` selects the first field, skips field 2 and then selects fields 3 to end.