UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,
Hoping someone can help!

I have a file (fileA) with a potentially different number of | delimited fields the file looks like:

fileA

Code:

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|

This file could have 100+ fields and have 2million+ records

I have another file (fileB) which contains an 8 digit code for each record of fileA:

fileB

Code:

88888888
99999999

The output needs to look like:

Code:

A|B|C|88888888|E|F|G|
A|B|C|99999999|E|F|G|

Replacing field 4 with data from fileB. (in real life i need to replace field 17!)

Thanks very much

Moderator's Comments:

Please use code tags when posting data and code samples!

You could use awk:

Code:

awk -F\| 'NR == FNR {
  _[FNR] = $0; next
  }
{ $4 = _[FNR] }
1' OFS=\| fileB fileA

Thanks radoulov works great and quickly.

Code:

awk '{getline $4<"fileB"}1' FS=\| OFS=\| fileA