I have semicolon-separated columns, and I would like to add some characters to a specific column.
aaa;111;bbb
ccc;222;ddd
eee;333;fff
to the second column I want to add '@', so the output should be;
aaa;@111;bbb
ccc;@222;ddd
eee;@333;fff
I tried
awk -F';' -OFS=';' '{ $2 = "@" $2}1' file
It adds the character but removes all semicolons with space.
You could use sed to do your job:
# replaces just the first occurrence of ';', note the absence of `g` that
# would have made it a global replacement
sed 's/;/;@/' file > file.out
or, to do it in place:
sed -i 's/;/;@/' file
Or, use awk:
awk -F';' '{$2 = "@"$2}1' OFS=';' file
All the above commands result in the same output for your example file:
aaa;@111;bbb
ccc;@222;ddd
eee;@333;fff
;. See the desired output in his question. I would love to see the awk solution from you.@atb: Try: 1st:
awk -F";" '{print $1 FS "@" $2 FS $3}' Input_file
Above will work only when your Input_file has 3 fields only.
2nd:
awk -F";" -vfield=2 '{$field="@"$field} 1' OFS=";" Input_file
Above code you could put any field number and could make it as per your request. Here I am making field separator as ";" and then taking a variable named field which will have the field number in it and then that concatenating "@" in it's value and 1 is for making condition TRUE and not making and action so by default print action will happen of current line.
You just misunderstood how to set variables. Change -OFS to -v OFS:
awk -F';' -v OFS=';' '{ $2 = "@" $2 }1' file
but in reality you should set them both to the same value at one time:
awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=";"} { $2 = "@" $2 }1' file
