substitutions

[Guest_imported]

I want to substitute all the words in my text that end on 'sses' by the word ending on 'ss', so kisses and misses becomes kiss and miss. I wanted to do it with gsub:
{ gsub(/.*sses/,???) }
but I don't think AWK has a memory to remember what's in .*.
Is there any way I can do this with AWK?

 

[marsd]

Here is a an idea for you.

awk ' {
if ($0 ~ /.*sses/) {
str = $0
m = index($0,"s&quot
val = substr($0,1,m) "s"
gsub(str,val,$0)
}
print
}' file

Awk can do almost anything.
If you run linux look at the alsaconfig script sometime
for an example.