i have a file in unix in which datas are like this 07 01 abc data entry Z3 data entry ASSISTANT Z3 39 08 01 POD peadiatrist Z4 POD PeDIATRY Z4 67 01 operator specialist 00 operator UNSPECIFIED A0 00 02 OLD NPA SPECIALTY 01 GP GENERAL PRACTICE C5 01 i want the datas to be tilde delimited as 07~01~abc~data entry~Z3~data entry ASSISTANT~Z3~39 ~01~~operator specialist~00~operator UNSPECIFIED~A0~00 can anybody help me on this in writing code for this

I'm interpreting that you want a carriage return at the first word that is all capital letters: sed 's/ /~/g' d.file| awk ' BEGIN { FS = "~"; OFS = "~" } { ff=0 for (i=1; i<NF; i++) if($i ~ /^[A-Z]+$/ && ff==0) { $i="\n"$i ff=1 } printf("%s\n", $0) } '

take note that OP doesn't want all spaces converted to ~