so basically im doing a program for school regarding a book inventory system. and im stucked on this part where the user is allowed to update sold books.

@echo "Enter title"
read $title
@echo "Enter author"
read $author
@echo "Enter copies sold"
read $sold

awk -v x="$title" -v y="$author" 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=":"}{if (($1~x) && ($2~y)) print $5-$sold}' BookDB.txt

storing format is [Title]:[Author]:[Price]:[Stock]:[Sold]
so basically i need to minus stock and increase sold

any help will be good

Welcome to LQ

Please use [code][/code] tags around your code to maintain format and readability.

1. I presume the awk is inside another script? What language is it?

2. Are you allowing the user to only enter part of the author and/or title? If so, your solution will currently output multiple entries.

3. $sold needs to be passed to awk the same as $title and $author

4. Used in this way, awk will not update anything and simply output information

5. You subtract $sold from the fifth field, but this is the Sold field ... shouldn't this be an addition? (as per the end of your post)

IGNORECASE is gawk feature (ignore case in regexp)

Sorry did not see the copies sold variable.
You have to pass this variable with -v, and do the math with $5 and $4

As grail said, it's easy to make error here and update pseudo duplicated lines, ideally each book should have an uniq ID

Oh yeah sorry the sold is +.
and i got it to work already.
i output S5 out to a variable, and then calculate the new values before passing it back in to save.

VAR1=$(awk -v x="$title" -v y="$author" -F ":" '($1 ~ x && $2 ~ y) {print $5}' BookDB.txt | tr -d "[]")

updatedsold=$(expr $VAR1 + $update)

awk -v x="$title" -v y="$author" 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=":"}{if (($1~x) && ($2~y)) $5="["'$updatedsold'"]"}1' BookDB.txt > tmpBookDB.txt && mv tmpBookDB.txt BookDB.txt

now i need to find a way to shorten it hahaha

Depending on your version awk (gawk) you can change the file in place. You also could ask all your questions and do all the steps in a single awk script, ie. instead of whichever shell you are using.

You also didn't answer the question about uniqueness? Perhaps you could show an example of the input file and what the user might enter?

I have also just noticed that the square brackets are actually part of the input to (thought they were just place holders).
You could place the square brackets in the FS variable if it makes it easier?