awk expression that works on awk v4.0.2 but it does not on >= 4.2.1 - bash

Question

I have this awk command:
echo www.host.com |awk -F. '{$1="";OFS="." ; print $0}' | sed 's/^.//'
which what it does is to get the domain from the hostname:
host.com
that command works on CentOS 7 (awk v 4.0.2), but it does not work on ubuntu 19.04 (awk 4.2.1) nor alpine (gawk 5.0.1), the output is:
host com
How could I fix that awk expression so it works in recent awk versions ?

Answer 1

For your provided samples could you please try following. This will try to match regex from very first . to till last of the line and then prints after first dot to till last of line.
echo www.host.com | awk 'match($0,/\..*/){print substr($0,RSTART+1,RLENGTH-1)}'
OP's code fix: In case OP wants to use his/her own tried code then following may help. There are 2 points here: 1st- We need not to use any other command along with awk to processing. 2nd- We need to set values of FS and OFS in BEGIN section which you are doing in everyline.
echo www.host.com | awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="."} {$1="";sub(/\./,"");print}'

Answer 2

To get the domain, use:
$ echo www.host.com | awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="."}{print $(NF-1),$NF}'
host.com
Explained:
awk '
BEGIN { # before processing the data
FS=OFS="." # set input and output delimiters to .
}
{
print $(NF-1),$NF # then print the next-to-last and last fields
}'
It also works if you have arbitrarily long fqdns:
$ echo if.you.have.arbitrarily.long.fqdns.example.com |
awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="."}{print $(NF-1),$NF}'
example.com
And yeah, funny, your version really works with 4.0.2. And awk version 20121220.
Update:
Updated with some content checking features, see comments. Are there domains that go higher than three levels?:
$ echo and.with.peculiar.fqdns.like.co.uk |
awk '
BEGIN {
FS=OFS="."
pecs["co\034uk"]
}
{
print (($(NF-1),$NF) in pecs?$(NF-2) OFS:"")$(NF-1),$NF
}'
like.co.uk

Answer 3

You got 2 very good answers on awk but I believe this should be handled with cut because of simplicity it offers in getting all fields starting for a known position:
echo 'www.host.com' | cut -d. -f2-
host.com
Options used are:
-d.: Set delimiter as .
-f2-: Extract all the fields starting from position 2

Answer 4

What you are observing was a bug in GNU awk which was fixed in release 4.2.1. The changlog states:
2014-08-12 Arnold D. Robbins
OFS being set should rebuild $0 using previous OFS if $0 needs to be
rebuilt. Thanks to Mike Brennan for pointing this out.
awk.h (rebuild_record): Declare.
eval.c (set_OFS): If not being called from var_init(), check if $0 needs rebuilding. If so, parse the record fully and rebuild it. Make OFS point to a separate copy of the new OFS for next time, since OFS_node->var_value->stptr was
already updated at this point.
field.c (rebuild_record): Is now extern instead of static. Use OFS and OFSlen instead of the value of OFS_node.
When reading the code in the OP, it states:
awk -F. '{$1="";OFS="." ; print $0}'
which, according to POSIX does the following:
-F.: set the field separator FS to represent the <dot>-character
read a record
Perform field splitting with FS="."
$1="": redefine field 1 and rebuild record $0 using OFS. At this time, OFS is set to be a single space. If the record $0 was www.foo.com it now reads _foo_com (underscores represent spaces). Recompute the number of fields which are now only one as there is no FS available anymore.
OFS=".": redefine the output field separator OFS to be the <dot>-character. This is where the bug happens. The Gnu awk knew that a rebuild needed to happend, but did this already with the new OFS and not the old OFS.
**print $0':** print the record $0 which is now_foo_com`.
The minimal change to your program would be:
awk -F. '{OFS="."; $1=""; print $0}'
The clean change would be:
awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="."}{$1="";print $0}'
The perfect change would be to replace the awk and sed by the cut solution of Anubahuva
If you have a variable with that name in there, you could use:
var=www.foo.com
echo ${var#*.}