title: Is there any faster way to truncate column in Unix
body: <p>I want to truncate 4th column of TSV file to given length in Unix. File has records in few millions and is of size 8GB.</p>
  
  <p>I am trying this but it seems to be kind of slow.</p>
  
  <pre><code>awk -F"\t" '{s=substr($4,0,256); print $1"\t"$2"\t"$3"\t"s"\t"$5"\t"$6"\t"$7}' file &gt; newFile
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there any faster alternatives for same?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>