Changing the case of a string with awk

Question

I\'m an awk newbie, so please bear with me.

The goal is to change the case of a string such that the first letter of every word is uppercase and the remaining letters ar

Answer 1

When matching regex using the sub() function or others (like gsub() etc), it's best used in the following form:

sub(/regex/, replacement, target)

This is different from what you have:

sub("regex", replacement, target)

So your command becomes:

awk '{ for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) sub(/\B\w+/, substr(tolower($i),2), $i) }1'

Results:

Abcd Efgh Ijkl Mnop

This article on String Functions maybe worth a read. HTH.

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I should say that there are easier ways to accomplish what you want, for example using GNU sed:

sed -r 's/\B\w+/\L&/g'