Tabbing the printed fields evenly using awk

Question

i need help using awk. Thanks

i have a file it contains the following

text.txt  
The Hunger Games:Suzanne Collins:1:2:3
Weapon X:Stan Lee:3:4:5
         


        

Answer 1

Try this to get tab spacings as in your example:

awk -F: '{if(NR==2)$2="\t"$2;print $1, $2, $3, $4, $5}' OFS="\t" BookDB.txt

Setting : as field seperator and \t as output field seperator. Then for the second line (NR==2), add one extra tab for the second field. Then print the fields.

Or even simpler (if it is acceptable for you):

sed "s/:/\t/g" BookDB.txt