That almost works. You don't need (or want) the asterisk in a call to gsub(). It matches every string of zero or more matches, which in this case effectively adds a space before any of the characters in the input that aren't in the list. You have several backslash characters escaping characters that aren't special inside a bracket expression, but they shouldn't hurt anything. Also, if the last arg to gsub() is left off, it uses $0 as a default.

The following line works:

Code:

awk '{gsub(/[|()\\\/;:\47`"]/," ");}1' input_file

Note, however, that this solution won't work on a system with EBCDIC as the codeset for the C Locale. (I think IBM still supports systems like this.) On a system using EBCDIC, you'd need to use \175 instead of \47. If you want to put this in an awk program file (where the script won't have quote processing performed by the shell before awk sees it, the following line should work:

script:

Code:

 {gsub(/[|()\\\/;:'`"]/," ");print}

Code:

awk -f script input_file

will work without codeset dependencies.