There are two things to consider here:pilnet101 already showed you how to do this with sed, but if you're doing other stuff to your file in awk (that you haven't shown us), there is no reason to use both sed and awk. So, if you want to do it in awk try changing:

Code:

gsub(",[0-9]",",[0-9] ")

to:

Code:

sub(",[0-9]","& ")

The & would also simplify the sed command. Some versions of awk will allow you to use the backreferences pilnet101 used in sed in sub() calls in awk, but that is a non-standard extension that is not always available. (The awk utility uses extended regular expressions while the sed utility uses basic regular expressions.

If you have tabs in your input file as field separators and want to add a space before an existing tab in your input and preserve other tabs in your input, change your script to:

Code:

awk -F '\t' '{sub(",[0-9]","& "); print}' OFS='\t' textfile

or, using sed:

Code:

sed 's/,[0-9]/& /' textfile