Question

I’m looking for other alternatives/more intelligent 1 liner for following command, which should add a value to a requested column number.
I tried following following sed command works properly for adding value 4 to the 4th column.
[Need: As i have such file which contains 1000 records & many times i need to add a column in between at any position.]
My approch is sutaible for smaller scale only.

cat 1.txt

1|2|3|5
1|2|3|5
1|2|3|5
1|2|3|5

sed -i 's/1|2|3|/1|2|3|4|/g' 1.txt

cat 1.txt

1|2|3|4|5
1|2|3|4|5
1|2|3|4|5
1|2|3|4|5

thansk in advance.

Answer 1

Field Separators
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Field-Separators.html

String Concatenation
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Concatenation.html

Default pattern and action
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Very-Simple.html

 awk -v FS='|' -v OFS='|' '{$3=$3"|"4} 1' 1.txt