Dear All,

I want to search and replace the text in file using awk. but facing hard luck in that.
Please help me out!!!!

> grep Abc.De.ync.rate /tmp/sdosanjh.txt
Abc.De.ync.rate 6 write

Now, I want to replace the "6" with value say "2".

I tried the follwoing using awk.... but its not working

% chgline=`cat /tmp/sdosanjh.txt | grep Abc.De.ync.rate | awk '{print ($2)}'`

% echo $chgline
6

% awk 'BEGIN{OFS=FS="Abc.De.ync.rate"}$2==$chgline{$2=5} {print}' /tmp/sdosanjh.txt

Something like this should work:

awk '/Abc.De.ync.rate/{$2=val}{print}' val=2 /tmp/sdosanjh.txt

nawk '/Abc.De.ync.rate/{if ($2==6) $2=2; print}' /tmp/sdosanjh.txt

Gr8 franklin it worked.
But its not preserving the file structure. Its trimming the tab spaces here as well in my reply... imagine there are two tab spaces after each field
if before edit the file was

Abc.De.ync.rate 6 write

Now it is like below
Abc.De.ync.rate 2 write

Any idea how it can be preserved???

If you ALWAYS have 2 tabs between fields....

awk '/Abc.De.ync.rate/{$2=val}{print}' val=2 OFS='\t\t' /tmp/sdosanjh.txt

Try this:

awk '/Abc.De.ync.rate/{$2=val}{print $1 "\t\t" val "\t\t" $3;next}{print}' val=2 /tmp/sdosanjh.txt