Question

I would like to manipulate string with awk.

Now to see current record on awk i’m using $0 and this works fine:

echo "foobar" | awk -v FS="" '{print $0 }'

my output is

foobar

Now I would like to replace my second character with 5th character:

echo "foobar" | awk -v FS="" '{$2=$5; print $0 }'

It works, but it adds space after each character:

f a o b a r

So my question is why awk add space after each character and how to so it right?

Answer 1

Set OFS(Output field separator) to empty:

$ echo "foobar" | awk -v FS="" '{$2=$5; print $0 }' OFS=""
faobar