Number of fields handled by awk

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi Gurus,

Have a file seperated by "~" and no of fields is 104. When i try to run awk, it erros out.

awk: record `B~A31~T24_STF~~~2009...' has too many fields

Any idea how can i extract a specific filed with this many fields in a row.

Kindly help

2

The limit of awk is 100 fields, the alternative is to use gawk or mawk.

Regards

3

Thanks. Looks like gawk is not avaliable on th machine. Anything with sed?

4

One way is not to use the ~ as fieldseparator and to place the fields in an array with the split function.
Should be something like this, play around with it:

awk '{
  split($0,array,"~")
  # now you can process the elements array[1]...array[104]
}' file