Chopping off the last field of each line?

Dave's Answer: My first instinct was to turn to awk or perl, but in fact there's a much easier way using basic Unix utilities: rev and cut:

$ rev inputfile | cut -f2- | rev > outputfile

How does this work? The rev command reverses each line of input, so that means that the first field of each now-reversed line is the field that we want to remove. That's easily done with cut with the -f2- flag (that means output field two through the end of the line). Then, finally, we re-reverse (that is, fix) each line and save the output in a new file.

Quickly and easily done.