Consider the following file. > cat junk.txt a(i)1b a(j)1b a(ij)1b a(ji)1b a(ijk)1b a(jik)1b a(ikj)1b a(jki)1b a(kij)1b a(kji)1b
In general the file is very long, might contain some other text. Now, I would like to replace all the occurrences of a(ijk)1b with a(ijk)23b a(jik)1b with a(jik)23b a(ikj)1b with a(ikj)23b and so on for all the strings such as a(???) Because of the size of the files involved, the number of files on which I have to perform this operation I decided to use sed (instead of doing it manually in vim) However my sed script currently involves 6 lines (for all the combinations of ijk) such as s/a(ijk)1b/a(ijk)23b/g s/a(jik)1b/a(jik)23b/g s/a(ikj)1b/a(ikj)23b/g and so on This method is very cumbersome, not scalable. If I have to do similar operations on a(ijklm) the script would be 120 lines! Is there any way to write something like s/a(???)1b/a(???)23b/g where the second ??? is the string matched by the first regular expression. In general, how can I obtain the string that is matched by a regular expression (in a shell script)? BTW, Is sed the right tool for this kind of job? If not, can you suggest any other tool that will get the job done in less time? PS: Please include my email in the CC. thanks raju -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
