Long ago on usenet, Tom Christiansen once wrote: "If you find yourself calling cat with just one argument, you're probably doing something silly". So you should lose the cat and replace:

cat /tmp/1.out|perl -lane 'print $F[1]..$F[-1]'
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perl -lane 'print join q{ }, @F[1..$#F]' /tmp/1.out
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perl -lape '$_=join q{ }, @F[1..$#F]' /tmp/1.out
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perl -lpe 's/\s*\S+\s*//' /tmp/1.out
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Update: See also Re: perl one liner for csv file one field (useless use of cat and other awards References)

Also long ago on Usenet, there was the Useless Use of cat award, usually awarded to a practitioner of "cat abuse" by merlyn. I won one once!

Jim

cat /tmp/1.out |perl -lane 'shift @F; print @F'
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Consider using cut instead of Perl.

cut -f 2- /tmp/1.out
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Jim

cat file | awk '{ print ( $2, $(NF-1) ) }'
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perl -ne "print unless $. == 1;" filename(s)
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Works for me. I would suggest that you show us (an extract) of your input file.

echo 1 2 3 4 5 6|perl -lane 'print $F[1]..$F[-1]'
23456
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Are your columns separated by whitespace?

Update: Of course, this doesn't work, for the reasons given by LanX in his reply to this (too hasty) posting.

Sorry thats wrong, your test data is misleading you :)

you are calculating the numerical range between 2 and 6, which by accident was your input.

now change the input in between:

> echo - 2 - - - 6|perl -lane 'print $F[1]..$F[-1]'
23456
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but a slice works: =)

> echo - 2 - - - 6|perl -lane 'print @F[1..$#F]'
2---6
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Cheers Rolf

Thanks for all the timely and helpful replies! Even answers not actually solving the problem, are very educational. I should have provided more detail, this problem has stymied me many times in many situations, and I finally got frustrated enough to ask the question. (and got the answer(s)!) In this case I wanted to print history without the line numbers on lines that were whitespace separated and variable columns. Thanks to all again! These worked for me ...

 
history|perl -lane 'print join q{ }, @F[1..$#F]'
perl -lane 'print join q{ }, @F[1..$#F]' /tmp/1.out
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If you have both history and Perl, then you probably also have cut.

history | cut -f 2-
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On my system, -n suppresses line numbers (but not the leading tab).

history -n
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Though it's handy to know -a and @F autosplit command-line idioms for use in some situations, this specific situation is one for which there's a simpler, less arcane way that doesn't require Perl. Also, using cut is less destructive than using Perl because it doesn't convert tabs to spaces as the Perl autosplit trick does. (Of course, this can be remedied by specifying an alternate separator pattern with the -F command-line option, but this is just leading you down the garden path.)

Jim