I want to delete the last 3 lines in a set of files and then replace then with 3 different lines. The files are of different sizes.How do I do it?

Hello, First of all, let me deal with the first part, that is to say removing the 3 trailing lines of your file. It strongly depends on your OS. Thus: - On TRU64/AIX/Solaris: You can use this: tail -r MyFile.txt|tail +4|tail -r - On Linux tac MyFile.txt|tail +4|tac In fact, the purpose is to reverse the file, then to get all lines except the 3 first ones (beginning then to the 4th), and to reverse the stream once again. All you have to do then is to redirect the stream to a file "... > MyNewFile.txt" But of course I suppose you're on HPUX... ;-) ok, it's a bit harder. Here, I can purpose you the following: l1=`wc -l MyFile.txt|cut -f1 -d' '`;l2=`expr $l1 - 3`;head -$l2 MyFile.txt which you can also redirect to a new file. Then, you have to put your 3 last lines. If these lines are in a text file: cat MyNewFile.txt TheLines.txt > MyLastNewFile.txt If this is in a script: echo $Line1 >> MyNewFile.txt echo $Line2 >> MyNewFile.txt echo $Line3 >> MyNewFile.txt Hope this could help. Xavier

And here is a sed solution ... for filename in file1 file2 file3 do sed -e ' 1N $!N $!P $!D $a\ newline 1\ newline 2\ newline 3 $d ' $filename > ${filename}new done

Thanks for the response!! Was of great help.