Efficient way of Awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,
Can someone let me know if the below AWK can be made much simpler / efficient ?

I have 200 fields, I need to substr only the last fields.
So i'm printing awk -F~ 'print {$1, $2, $3....................................$196,$197 , susbstr($198,1,3999), substr($199,1,3999)..}'

Is there a way we can rewritten ??

Thnx

2

By efficient I think you mean readable

awk -F~ '{ for(i=1;i<198;i++){
                printf("%s ", $i);
              }
              for(i=198;i<NF;i++){
                printf("%s ", substr($i,1,3999);
              }
              printf("%s\n", $NF);
          }' someinputfile

Most awks cannot read lines longer 2048 bytes, so I don't get the substr($199,1,3999)
part....

edit per vgersh99

3

braindrain,
how many of 'last' fields do you need to operate on?

jim,
NR != NF

4

Vgersh,
I have last 3 fields to be operated upon.

Also, If AWK / other stream editors cannot operate on string of 4000, is there an alternative that we can use. I have a continous string of 4500, due to limitation in oracle which can stroe 4000, I would like to trim it forehond.

there were some discussion in this forum not very decisive, so I had open a thread, sorry.

5 
nawk -F~ -v OFS='~' '{
              for(i=(NF-3);i<=NF;i++){
                $i = substr($i,1,3999);
    
              $1=$1; print
          }' someinputfile

if 'nawk' does break on your records and if you're on Sun/Solaris try '/usr/xpg4/bin/awk' OR if you have 'gawk' installed on your system - try it.