UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Set the output field separator to <TAB>: OFS="\t" just before the file name.
The non-substitution was possibly due to several factors:
- a three char word would offer few options to subst; in fact, we would have one single substitution only, when going for LEN/2 chars.
- the rand() function can return a zero value, so none of the string's characters (1 - LEN) were targeted.



Try

Code:

awk -F"\t" '
        {LEN = split ($2, T, "")
         $2 = ""
         for (i=1; i<=(LEN+1)/2; i++) T[int(.5+rand()*LEN)] = " _ "
         for (i=1; i<=LEN;       i++) $2 = $2 T[i]
        }
1
' OFS="\t" file

Worked like magic!

------ Post updated at 04:51 AM ------

Final result: approx 1200 words didn't come out with any letter blanked out out of a total of 48k. I can't see any patterns or similarities in them.

Again, facts, please. Does it happen again / identical to the same words on a second run?

Yes, always the same words.

Here is the non-blanked out words file.

Extract a few of the offending lines into a small file and run the script several times - there should be varying substitutions; at least there are when I do.

As said in the beginning - it's an approximation to be refined if further conditions need to be met.

Yes, the offending lines become less numerous as I run the code and process again the resulting lines. It works perfect for me!

Thanks again RudiC!

Shall we close the thread?

------ Post updated at 05:48 AM ------

It took me 9 rounds. The final 2 rounds consisted of 3-letter words and a very few 2-word.