Awk: how to separate a field?

Question

Hello!
Instead of having one awk field for date and time I wanna seperate them in two. I think the easiest would be to replace in every row the eleventh character by a space or tab. Just don't know how to do it.
2008/03/01/00:00:00 -28.8748 +32.6493
Thanks in advance
Bastian

Answer 1

Your question is somewhat leading because if you're already using awk you may have to integrate the rule into an existing workflow.
That said, the simplest way to replace the 11th character with a space would be:
awk '{print substr($0,1,10)" "substr($0,12,$NF)}'
This takes $0 (the input string) and prints the first 10 characters followed by a space followed by characters 12 through the end.
Another approach would be to use field delimiters - useful if the date format varies (e.g. uses single digit months):
awk -F/ '{print $1"/"$2"/"$3" "$4}'
In this model the input string is broken into fields based on the character /
then it prints the first two fields followed by a / then the third field followed by a space, and finally the fourth field (or in this case, remaining text).
There are countless other methods, too including sprintf.