Hi
I wish to capitalize the first letter or every word in a text file with:

gawk '{$0=gensub(/(\w)(\w*)/,toupper("\\1")"\\2","g");}' file.txt

Have a look here:

only-uppercase-first-character

perl -pe 's/\b./\u$&/g' file.txt

Thanks but the solution from this thread

    #for ( i=1; i <= NF; i++) {
    #    sub(".", substr(toupper($i),1,1),$i)
    #    }  
    print

I am guessing the back reference \\1 does not get passed to the toupper function inside the replacement part of gawk's gensub function:

Alternatively:

awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)$i=toupper(substr($i,1,1)) substr($i,2)}1'  infile

perl -pe 's/\b./\u$&/g' infile

even better
btw my solution works fine with d'alpinisme

indeed, this must be it.

tip78 ...the problem is with accentuated words lire Détente....your pearl gives DéTente....