title: Using awk to remove a field ending in a certain character
body: <p>I'm pretty new at unix in general and I'm having a tough time trying to figure out how to accomplish something I'm trying to do. For a record looking like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code> Name:Alice,ID:2368, Hometown:columbus,bithday:03/11/1988
  Name:Bob,ID:2568,Hometown:New York,bithday:04-24-1985
  Name:Ted,ID:2368, Hometown:Portland,bithday:06-11-1992
  Name:Mark,        ID:2218, Hometown:Palo Alto,bithday:04-23-1984
  Name:Xiao,      ID:2571, hometown:Carson,bithday:07/06/1975
  Name:Rain,  ID:0264, hometown:little stone,bithday:11-09-1982
  Name:Susuan, ID:1261, Hometown:Menlo park,bithday:12-13-1989
  Name:Zack,  ID:1594, Hometown:columbus,bithday:02-04-1984
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to remove any column ending in a colon and at the same time end up with no commas.</p>
  
  <p>So a certain line might look like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Mark 2218 Palo Alto 04-23-1984
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've looked at a few examples of using awk and this is my idea so far:</p>
  
  <pre><code>awk 'BEGIN {FS=":"} ; {for (i=1; i&lt;=NF; i++) 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My thought process is to basically loop through each line and say, "If the field ends in a colon then remove it and look for the next field ending in a colon, go to the next line and so on. I just am not sure how to do this and I'm struggling because all the tutorials I've seen so far don't do anything similar to this. If anyone could help me out I would sincerely appreciate it! I would be grateful for any help at all.</p>