From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
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Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:04:21 +0100
From: matt <maht-9fans@maht0x0r.net>
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To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] awk help; not plan9 matter
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6fc2901e-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

awk '{a=$2; sub(a, "hell"); print}' file

also works if it contains no regex special chars

this seems to do the trick otherwise

awk ' { p=substr($0, index($0, " ")); split(p, a, "[^ ]"); sub(/ +[^ ]+/, "", p); print $1 a[1] "hell" p} '



Rudolf Sykora wrote:

>Hello,
>
>simple task.
>I want to change the 2nd field on each line of a file, but preserve
>the spacing of the lines.
>
>If I do
>  awk '{$2="hell"; print}' file
>the field gets changed, but all the spacing of the lines is gone; i.e.
>any space is now just ' ' like this:
>1      3 4           8
>changes to
>1 hell 4 8
>while I need
>1      hell 4           8.
>
>Any help?
>Thanks
>Ruda
>
>
>