Shell Programming and Scripting

Yes, because the "printf"-family of functions do not terminate (lines of) output with a newline per default. You have to explicitly state that:

Code:

 awk 'NF{$1=sprintf("%s:%s-%s\n",$1,$2,$3); $2=$4; NF-=2}1'  file

I hope this helps.

bakunin

I must be missing the point here. Other than printing a space (instead of a tab) between the two output fields, I don't see what was wrong with Akshay Hegde's oriiginal suggestion.

To change the space in the output to a tab, any of the following would work:

Code:

awk '{print $1 ":" $2 "-" $3 "\t" $4}' file.txt
                    or
awk '{print $1 ":" $2 "-" $3 OFS $4}' OFS="\t" file.txt
                    or
awk '{print $1 ":" $2 "-" $3, $4}' OFS="\t" file.txt

or, if there are empty lines in your input (not shown in your sample input) that are to be printed without change:

Code:

awk 'NF == 0 {print; next}
{print $1 ":" $2 "-" $3 "\t" $4}' file.txt