Thanks! Just the helpful nudge in the right direction i needed. as an aside, I just discovered that our RS/6000 seems to have no manpages on there at all -- "There is not an entry for awk," "There is not an entry for sed", etc etc etc. Guess I'll have to wait til I get home to poke around on my linux box. Anyhow, thanks again, Nick > man sed. > > seriously, it's sed (stream editor) that will give you the search and > replace functionality that you're after. might want to make friends > with awk as well. ;-) > > when last we saw our hero (Tuesday, Sep 16, 2003), > np was madly tapping out: >> >> Hello list, >> >> I'm working at a used bookstore, running a fairly archaic cataloguing >> program which runs on an IBM AIX server (Windows machines telnet in to >> catalogue, run point of sale, etc.) All databases are exported in >> tab-delimited text format, with whatever fields you have specified to >> export -- all standard issue stuff. We're beginning to upload our inventory >> to websites, and we need to do a little tweaking to the exported database >> file before we upload -- basically, we need to replace the terse condition >> descriptions we have on the database (limited to 8 characters!) with rather >> more descriptive versions for online browsers.. >> >> So I need to write a script which does a search and replace (ex. search for >> 'NEW', replace with 'In new condition, with no blemishes," etc..) >> Unfortunately I'm pretty much a newbie when it comes to scripting - I've >> done some C, some (very minor) Bash scripting, but no Korn shell scripting >> at all. Could anyone offer any help in how to solve this problem? If >> someone could just point out a couple of commands (I'm looking into sed and >> awk, but not sure if this is the best place to start), I'll happily read >> the man pages -- I'd just like to get some tips on where to look first! >> >> thanks in advance, >> >> Nick >> >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > -- > steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org > PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list