Remove leftmost columns from text file

Removing the left N columns from a text file can be done with the one-liner below. This example trims off the first 2 columns of each row of a text file “old.txt”, resaving as “new.txt”:

cut -c2- > new.txt < old.txt

For example, clean diff output of all the plus/minus signs or eliminate unwanted characters in the first column(s) of a text file.

Related: remove right columns from text file