Here's the situation, I have a text file that is pipe-delimited and one of fields contains pipe characters. I already have a sed script that will change it to be tab-delimited, but the problem is it's terribly slow. It will replace the first occurrence of a pipe 8 times, then replace the last occurrence of a pipe 4 times. I'm hoping there's a quicker way to do what I need.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Here's my current sed script:

sed 's/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/|\(.*\)/\t/;s/\(.*\)|/\t/;s/\(.*\)|/\t/;s/\(.*\)|/\t/;s/\(.*\)|/\t/' $1 > $1.tab

Thanks,

-Dan