awk - split only by first occurrence - bash

Question

I have a line like:
one:two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
and I want to use awk to get $1 to be one and $2 to be two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
I know I can get it by doing sed before. That is to change the first occurrence of : with sed then awk it using the new delimiter.
However replacing the delimiter with a new one would not help me since I can not guarantee that the new delimiter will not already be somewhere in the text.
I want to know if there is an option to get awk to behave this way
So something like:
awk -F: '{print $1,$2}'
will print:
one two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
I will also want to do some manipulations on $1 and $2 so I don't want just to substitute the first occurrence of :.

Answer 1

Without any substitutions
echo "one:two:three:four:five" | awk -F: '{ st = index($0,":");print $1 " " substr($0,st+1)}'
The index command finds the first occurance of the ":" in the whole string, so in this case the variable st would be set to 4. I then use substr function to grab all the rest of the string from starting from position st+1, if no end number supplied it'll go to the end of the string. The output being
one two:three:four:five
If you want to do further processing you could always set the string to a variable for further processing.
rem = substr($0,st+1)
Note this was tested on Solaris AWK but I can't see any reason why this shouldn't work on other flavours.

Answer 2

Some like this?
echo "one:two:three:four:five:six" | awk '{sub(/:/," ")}1'
one two:three:four:five:six
This replaces the first : to space.
You can then later get it into $1, $2
echo "one:two:three:four:five:six" | awk '{sub(/:/," ")}1' | awk '{print $1,$2}'
one two:three:four:five:six
Or in same awk, so even with substitution, you get $1 and $2 the way you like
echo "one:two:three:four:five:six" | awk '{sub(/:/," ");$1=$1;print $1,$2}'
one two:three:four:five:six
EDIT:
Using a different separator you can get first one as filed $1 and rest in $2 like this:
echo "one:two:three:four:five:six seven:eight" | awk -F\| '{sub(/:/,"|");$1=$1;print "$1="$1 "\n$2="$2}'
$1=one
$2=two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
Unique separator
echo "one:two:three:four:five:six seven:eight" | awk -F"#;#." '{sub(/:/,"#;#.");$1=$1;print "$1="$1 "\n$2="$2}'
$1=one
$2=two:three:four:five:six seven:eight

Answer 3

The closest you can get with is with GNU awk's FPAT:
$ awk '{print $1}' FPAT='(^[^:]+)|(:.*)' file
one
$ awk '{print $2}' FPAT='(^[^:]+)|(:.*)' file
:two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
But $2 will include the leading delimiter but you could use substr to fix that:
$ awk '{print substr($2,2)}' FPAT='(^[^:]+)|(:.*)' file
two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
So putting it all together:
$ awk '{print $1, substr($2,2)}' FPAT='(^[^:]+)|(:.*)' file
one two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
Storing the results of the substr back in $2 will allow further processing on $2 without the leading delimiter:
$ awk '{$2=substr($2,2); print $1,$2}' FPAT='(^[^:]+)|(:.*)' file
one two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
A solution that should work with mawk 1.3.3:
awk '{n=index($0,":");s=$0;$1=substr(s,1,n-1);$2=substr(s,n+1);print $1}' FS='\0'
one
awk '{n=index($0,":");s=$0;$1=substr(s,1,n-1);$2=substr(s,n+1);print $2}' FS='\0'
two:three:four five:six:seven
awk '{n=index($0,":");s=$0;$1=substr(s,1,n-1);$2=substr(s,n+1);print $1,$2}' FS='\0'
one two:three:four five:six:seven

Answer 4

Just throwing this on here as a solution I came up with where I wanted to split the first two columns on : but keep the rest of the line intact.
Comments inline.
echo "a:b:c:d::e" | \
awk '{
split($0,f,":"); # split $0 into array of fields `f`
sub(/^([^:]+:){2}/,"",$0); # remove first two "fields" from `$0`
print f[1],f[2],$0 # print first two elements of `f` and edited `$0`
}'
Returns:
a b c:d::e
In my input I didn't have to worry about the first two fields containing escaped :, if that was a requirement, this solution wouldn't work as expected.
Amended to match the original requirements:
echo "a:b:c:d::e" | \
awk '{
split($0,f,":");
sub(/^([^:]+:)/,"",$0);
print f[1],$0
}'
Returns:
a b:c:d::e