UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I'm running a script on AIX to process lines in a file. I need to enclose the second column in quotation marks and write each line to a new file. I've come up with the following:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

filename=$1
exec >> $filename.new
cat $filename | while read LINE
do
  echo $LINE | awk '{$2="\""$2"\"";print}'
done

This works correctly, however it is very slow (there are hundreds of thousands of records, so it is taking an hour for each file.) Is there something in this that is inherently slow in what I'm doing here? Is there a way to do this much faster?

Any suggestions appreciated...
Thanks,
Scott

This would be simpler and removes the cat and echo for each line of each file, which should speed things up.

Code:

awk '{$2="\""$2"\"";print}' $1 >> ${1}.new

wow. went from around an hour to about 10 seconds to process the same file. Thanks so much for helping me out!
--Scott