Trying another tack with awk ...see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50244876/how-to-use-gsub-in-awk-to-find-and-replace-and-txt-characters-within
where it's said:
echo "./file_name.txt|1230" | awk '{gsub(/\.\/|\.txt/,"")}1' file_name|1230In the present task, taking just one exemplar PTR, see the attached file, which also shows bash's response.
The character that's flagged is the end-parenthesis, but that's part of the standard gsub syntax.
George Langford
