Question

How should I go about inserting a character at a certain point in a csv line? For instance, if I had the following:

1,2,3,4,5,6,7

How could I insert ,,,,, at the spot where the 5 (fifth field) is, so it would look like

1,2,3,4,,,,,,5,6,7

I found a link for how to do this for java, but unfortunately I did not have much luck finding out how to do it with bash. Any help would be much appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

You can use awk to change a specific field:

awk -F"," '{OFS=","; a=$5; $5=",,,,,",a; print $0}' file

The idea is to update the field 5 with the desired values and then print the whole line.

---

 echo "1,2,3,4,5,6,7" | awk -F"," '{a=$5; $5=",,,,,"a; OFS=","; print}'

would print:

1,2,3,4,,,,,,5,6,7