title: awk - split only by first occurrence
body: <p>I have a line like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>one:two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I want to use <code>awk</code> to get  <code>$1</code> to be one and <code>$2</code> to be <code>two:three:four:five:six seven:eight</code></p>
  
  <p>I know I can get it by doing <code>sed</code> before. That is to change the first occurrence of <code>:</code> with <code>sed</code> then <code>awk</code> it using the new delimiter.</p>
  
  <p>However replacing the delimiter with a new one would not help me since I can not guarantee that the new delimiter will not already be somewhere in the text.</p>
  
  <p>I want to know if there is an option to get <code>awk</code> to behave this way</p>
  
  <p>So something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>awk -F: '{print $1,$2}'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>will print:</p>
  
  <pre><code>one two:three:four:five:six seven:eight
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I will also want to do some manipulations on <code>$1</code> and <code>$2</code> so I don't want just to substitute the first occurrence of <code>:</code>.</p>