I have a file with thousands of records. Example: xxxx|ccccc|County kkkk|oo|ppppp|pppppppp xxxx|ccccc|(County) kkkk|oo|ppppp|pppppppp I need County, (County) removed from field 3 in this example. so it should read as follow: xxxx|ccccc|kkkk|oo|ppppp|pppppppp xxxx|ccccc|kkkk|oo|ppppp|pppppppp new to this if you can help me I would appreciate this in a unix script thanks

Input (input.txt): sed 's/[()*Country[)]* //g' input.txt Luke Chi

That sed could delete all sorts of data, such as any of those letters followed by a space, and from anywhere in the line. This awk will delete only from word 3: awk -F\| 'BEGIN{OFS="|"}{sub("[(]*County[)]* ","",$3);print}'

I need it to work for field 3- not word 3 the word could be anywhere in field 3 - field1, field 2, field4 etc.. should not be affected by it. for example: sss sss s|sssss|ssss (Country)|sss sss xxxx xx|xxx xxxx|Country xxxx| xxxx xx need so look like this when done sss sss s|sssss|ssss|sss sss xxxx xx|xxx xxxx|xxxx| xxxx xx thanks for your help in advance

awk -F\| 'BEGIN{OFS="|"}{sub("[ ]*[(]*Country[)]*[ ]*","",$3);print}' input.txt Luke Chi