I am trying to mask the 6th column in this delimited file. Currently my attempt masks the entire file. I was wondering what I may be doing incorrectly.
Current:
awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="^^"} {gsub(/./, "X", $1)} 6' $1
Input:
00000000001^^00023^^111112233^^C^^ ^^Iwanttomaskthis ^^ ^^ ^^U^^W^^ ^^ ^^222^^6^^77
00000000001^^00024^^111112233^^B^^ ^^Iwanttomaskthis ^^ ^^ ^^X^^W^^ ^^ ^^333^^9^^88
Expected:
00000000001^^00023^^111112233^^C^^ ^^XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX^^ ^^ ^^U^^W^^ ^^ ^^222^^6^^77
00000000001^^00024^^111112233^^B^^ ^^XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX^^ ^^ ^^U^^W^^ ^^ ^^222^^6^^77
You can use this awk:
awk 'BEGIN{FS="\\^\\^"; OFS="^^"} {gsub(/./, "X", $6)} 1' file
00000000001^^00023^^111112233^^C^^ ^^XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX^^ ^^ ^^U^^W^^ ^^ ^^222^^6^^77
00000000001^^00024^^111112233^^B^^ ^^XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX^^ ^^ ^^X^^W^^ ^^ ^^333^^9^^88
Here we need to escape ^ because ^ is a special regex meta-characters.