AWK Command – How to Replace Content of a Specific Column

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Given: there are 40 columns in a record. I want to replace the 35th column so that the 35th column will be replaced with the content of the 35th column and a "$" symbol. What came to mind is something like:

awk '{print $1" "$2" "...$35"$ "$36...$40}'

It works but because it is infeasible when the number of column is as large as 10k. I need a better way to do this.

Best Answer

You can do like this:

awk '$35=$35"$"'

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AWK – How to Replace Content of Specific Column in Tab Delimited File

You need to set Output Field Separator, to tab \t:

One way to do it is with -v option:

awk -vOFS='\t' '{$3 = "AD"; print}' file

another possibility inside awk, say in the BEGIN block:

awk 'BEGIN{OFS="\t"}{$3 = "AD"; print}' file

If you don't set OFS, then awk by default uses single space as a field separator.

Print columns that start with a specific string

With awk:

awk '{for(i=5;i<=NF;i++){if($i~/^ANC=/){a=$i}} print $1,$2,$3,$4,a}' file

for(...) loops through all fields, starting with field 5 (i=5).
- if($i~/^ANC=/) checks if the field starts with ANC=
- a=$i if yes, set variable a to that value
print $1,$2,$3,$4,a print fields 1-4 followed by whatever is stored in a.

Can be combined with BEGIN {OFS="\t"} of course.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

AWK – How to Replace Content of Specific Column in Tab Delimited File

Print columns that start with a specific string

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