如何仅在特定行和特定列中使用 awk

Question

For example i have the following file:

4:Oscar:Ferk:Florida
14:Steven:Pain:Texas
7:Maya:Ross:California

and so on... It has an unknown number of lines because you can keep adding more to it. I'm writing a script where you can edit the name by giving in the id of the person and the new name you want to give it as parameters.

What i am trying to do is use awk to find the line and then change the name on that specific line and update the file. I'm having trouble because my code updates every single column value to the given one.

My current code is:

getID=$1
getName=$2

awk -v varID="$getID" -F':' '$0~varID' file.dat | awk -v varName="$getName" -F':' '$2=varName' file.dat > tmp && mv tmp file.dat

Help is really appreciated, thank you kindly in advance.

Answer 1

You may use this awk:

getID=14          # change to getID="$1"
getName='John K'  # change to getName="$2"

awk -v id="$getID" -v name="$getName" 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=":"} $1==id{$2=name} 1' file

4:Oscar:Ferk:Florida
14:John K:Pain:Texas
7:Maya:Ross:California