How to replace the nth column/field in a comma-separated string using sed/awk?
- by Peter Meier
assume I have a string
"1,2,3,4"
Now I want to replace, e.g. the 3rd field of the string by some different value.
"1,2,NEW,4"
I managed to do this with the following command:
echo "1,2,3,4" | awk -F, -v OFS=, '{$3="NEW"; print }'
Now the index for the column to be replaced should be passed as a variable. So in this case
index=3
How can I pass this to awk? Because this won't work:
echo "1,2,3,4" | awk -F, -v OFS=, '{$index="NEW"; print }'
echo "1,2,3,4" | awk -F, -v OFS=, '{$($index)="NEW"; print }'
echo "1,2,3,4" | awk -F, -v OFS=, '{\$$index="NEW"; print }'
Thanks for your help!
