awk and tr troubles

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I am trying to make all the fields containing lower case letters upper case and the third field of a file display ** instead.
I have this:

 awk '{printf "%s %s ** %d %d\n", $1, $2, $4, $5}' database.txt | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' < database.txt

And that only changes it to upper case, other way around then it would display just the stars. Is there any way of doing BOTH?

2

not understand your question. Could you please provide the sample database.txt and expect output directly?

3

Remove "< database.txt"

 awk '{printf "%s %s ** %d %d\n", $1, $2, $4, $5}' database.txt | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'
4

That did the trick, thank you. I also have a problem with changing delimiters between fields.

 awk -F"-" '{print $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6}' database.txt

is what I have, and have been fooling around with it but I don't get any results.

5

Do you mean Output Field Separator (OFS)? Then:

awk 'BEGIN {OFS="-"} { print $1, $2 ... }'