awk: printing from a specified field onwards

OK, this is way to complicated when a simple substr() on $0 will suffice but I like it!

awk '{for(i=1;i<4;i++)$i="";sub(/^ */,"");print}' error.txt | sort -u

Notice that it's piped into a sort because awk doesn't have it's own sort command.

All this command is doing is printing everything after field four.

Below is a modification of the above command that prints only the unique lines (based on all fields after field 4):

awk '{for(i=1;i<4;i++)$i=""; sub(/^ */,""); err[$0] = $0 } END { for ( u in err ) print err[u] }'

Notice that $0 is the modified $0 without fields one thru 4.