Example showing how to manipulate tab separated data on the standard input, and write the manipulated data to standard output.

stream_editing_tsv.py

import csv
from sys import stdin, stdout

tsv_in = csv.reader(stdin, delimiter="\t")
tsv_out = csv.writer(stdout, delimiter="\t")

for row in tsv_in:
    # Write out only columns 2-*
    tsv_out.writerow(row[1:])

To be executed like this:

cat some_tab_separated_data.tsv|python stream_editing_tsv.py|less