Hi All,

I have a tab delimited input file with say 4 fields (columns) as below :

0000443 1AGPR061 2006 Daiml
0002198 1B3XG0K2 1989 Chdds
0002199 1Bd64J0L 1990 Ch34s
0002275 1B3s4J0K 1989 Chadys
0002276 1B465302 2002 Dageml
0002290 1B45430K 1989 Cays

I want the 2nd column in file to be replaced with only first 2 chars and 6th char of the 2nd column values, so output should look like :

0000443 1A0 2006 Daiml
0002198 1B0 1989 Chdds
0002199 1BJ 1990 Ch34s
0002275 1BJ 1989 Chadys
0002276 1B3 2002 Dageml
0002290 1B3 1989 Cays

Can anyone help me with this ?

cat temp.txt  | perl -T\t -ane '$F[1] =~ s/^(.{2}).{3}(.).*$/$1$2/; print join("\t", @F) . "\n"'

gawk -F'\t' '{print $1, substr($2, 1, 2) substr($2, 6, 1), $3, $4}' file

With sed:

sed 's[     \(..\)...\(.\)..[       \1\2[' infile

awk '{printf "%s\t%s%s\t%s\t%s\n", $1, substr($2,1,2),substr($2,6,1), $3, $4}' file

Thanks everyone for good and quick solutions provided ...Its working