Awk replace a column with its hash value

Question

How can I replace a column with its hash value (like MD5) in awk or sed?

The original file is super huge, so I need this to be really efficient.

Answer 1

You can also do that with perl :

echo "aze qsd wxc" | perl -MDigest::MD5 -ne 'print "$1 ".Digest::MD5::md5_hex($2)." $3" if /([^ ]+) ([^ ]+) ([^ ]+)/' 
aze 511e33b4b0fe4bf75aa3bbac63311e5a wxc

If you want to obfuscate large amount of data it might be faster than sed and awk which need to fork a md5sum process for each lines.