## $0 $1 etc
$0 is the whole line, $1 is the first column, $2 the second, etc.

## Shift
There is no shift in awk. So you need to be a little creative.

The example here is to turn a two column, whitespace delimited table
into a [markdown table](/lang/markdown/Tables).
```awk
awk '{ printf("| %s | ",$1); for(i=2;i<=NF;i++) printf("%s ",$i); print " |"; }'
```
though this does not respect whitespace. In the case of the above, [sed](/gnu/sed)
does a better job:
```bash
sed -e 's/^\s*\(\w*\)\s\s*\(.*\)$/| \1 | \2 |/'
```