Shell Programming and Scripting

Thanks, that worked.

As Don Cragun pointed put, in general this method may fail if there are any characters in the string variable q that need to be escaped in order to be taken literally, since the string is interpreted by sub as an extended regular expression..

An alternative approach using string assignment:

Code:

awk '
  NR==2{
    h3=$3
  }
  NR==3 && $3==h3{
    getline p
    split(p,F)
    for(i=3; i<=10; i++) $i=F[i]
    print $0 ORS p
    next
  }
  1
' FS=',[ \t]*' OFS=, file

The input field separator (FS) is used to remove leading space from the comparison.. If there is also trailing space, one could use:

Code:

FS='[ \t]*,[ \t]*' OFS=,