Do you want to run sed only on special field? Do you want run awk on part range? Yes, that's what you want!
With dealin, you can run shell text processing programs on part of line.
Ruby version: works C version: not start yet
dealin [-Fsep] -fnum[,num] command ...
# upper field 2
dealin -f2 tr a-z A-Z file.txt
# remove ext name in ls -l result
ls -l | dealin -f9 sed 's/\..*$//'
# transform ip to country in field 2
cat data.txt | dealin -f2 ./ip2country.rb
# run awk in part area
cat data.txt | dealin '/\(.*?\)/' awk '...'