How to use sed to delete leading digits?

Question

I have a file:

$ cat file 
1 Fred
2 Fred3
3 Fred3
4 Fred3
5 Fred3
6 Fred3
7 Fred3
8 Fred3
9 Fred3
10 Fred3
11 Fred3
12 Fred288

I want to delete the leading numbers, the output should be like this:

$ cat file 
Fred
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred288

How can I achieve this goal using sed?

Answer 1

With sed:

sed 's/^[0-9]\+ //' file
Fred
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred3
Fred288

Do sed -i 's/^[0-9]\+ //' file to store the changes back to the file.

---

I would also recommend using cut for this

cut -d' ' -f2 file

Options:

-d, --delimiter=DELIM use DELIM instead of TAB for field delimiter

-f, --fields=LIST select only these fields; also print any line that contains no delimiter character, unless the -s option is specified

Answer 2

This will print the second word in each line:

awk '{print $2}' file