Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello All,

I am trying to replace a column within a line that has a certain fruit name. I have a bunch of line such as:

Code:

apple:green:5cents:CA
pineapple:red:4cents:FL
orange:green:6cents:HI

...and change the third column in the specific line that matches the $fruitname variable to update the price.

So far, I have the following;

Code:

myfunc() {
     echo "\nPlease enter the new price."
     read newprice
     grep -i $fruitname fruitfile | awk 'BEGIN { FS=OFS=":"} { $3=$newprice; print}' | tee tempfile
}

myfunc $fruitname

...and the result I ma getting is that it is placing entire lines in the spot that the third column as opposed to simply updating the price column only.

My other option is to use sed instead of awk above, such as

Code:

sed "s/$oldprice/$newprice/" | tee tempfile

...but it would require one to also enter the current price, and it results in a blank column but everything else stays as is. Any idea?

You supply the fruit name as a parameter to myfunc PLUS you read it from stdin. On the other hand, I can't see the newprice variable populated nor passed to awk. And, if you enter "apple", both red and green apples will get the new price, should it contain some value, and should awk be passed that value.
All other lines not containing fruitname will be suppressed.
Not sure that this is what you intend to do...

In your sed solution, use a regex address to modify the fruitname containing lines only, and yes, the old price needs to be entered as well.

Thanks for the prompt response. I updated the fruit types, one of the "apple" columns should have been "pineapple", which I have updated, also updated the newprice variable, which was supposed to be the prompt, not for $fruitname variable which was already passed to the function. The results are as originally stated.

---------- Post updated at 04:19 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:55 PM ----------

I figured it out, it was a typo all along. The sed replace code was fin after all:

Code:

sed "s/$oldprice/$newprice/" | tee tempfile