Get 4 character each from 2 different fields concatenate and add as a new field

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a huge text file. It looks like

abcde bangalo country 12345 lastfield

i want to get first 3 characters from field1 and first 3 characters from field 2 and insert the result as a new field. example the result should be:

abcde bangalo abcban country 12345 lastfield

Please help me on this

Thanks in advance for your help.

2

Hi.

Would this work:

awk '{$2 = $2 " " substr( $1, 1, 3 ) substr($2, 1, 3); print}' file
 
Output:
abcde bangalo abcban country 12345 lastfield

(ps: your example showed getting only 3 characters, not 4)

3 
awk '{ fld=substr($1,1,3) substr($2,1,3); print $1, $2, fld, $3, $4, $5} ' inputfile > newfile
4 
echo "abcde bangalo country 12345 lastfield" | sed 's/\(...\)\([^ ]* \)\(...\)\([^ ]* \)/\1\2\3\4\1\3 /'
5 
#!/bin/ksh
# or bash
# script
while read f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 fx
do
         fnew="${f1:0:3}${f2:0:3}"
         echo "$f1 $f2 $fnew $f3 $f4 $f5"
done

chmod a+rx script
./script < infile > outfile

---------- Post updated at 03:04 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:02 PM ----------

Awk is faster.