The line of text that I am trying to use is - sed 's/flag1/$cnumber' $header > $header I have a document (header) with place holders flag1, flag2, flag3, etc. I want to replace the place holder with the value of $cnumber. The error I get is "sed: 0602-404 function s/flag1/$cnumber cannot be parsed. The file "header" looks like {{Begin}} {{Company flag1}} {{Winsecid LAWSON_FAX}} {{Contact flag2}} {{Endcovertext}} {{Fax flag3}} Can somebody tell what I am doing wrong?

This link shows how to embed shell variables in sed commands: http://www.computing.net/answers/pr...

I must be doing something wrong. I tried enclosing the value in single and double quotes, double and single quotes, single quotes, and finally double quotes. sed -e 's/flag1/"'$cnumber'"/' $header > $header.txt None of it seems to work.

It works on my Solaris 9 box: #!/bin/ksh cnumber=myflag sed -e 's/flag1/'"${cnumber}"'/' header > header.txt

Thank you for the help. I will check with operations for our AIX box. There has to be something a little different.

sed 's/flag1/$cnumber' $header > $header The first problem is redirecting to the file you are reading from clobbers your input file. Try this: header=header cnumber=10 sed -e "s/flag1/"${cnumber}"/" $header > header1 Your header file before: {{Begin}} {{Company flag1}} {{Winsecid LAWSON_FAX}} {{Contact flag2}} {{Endcovertext}} {{Fax flag3}} Your header file after: {{Begin}} {{Company 10}} {{Winsecid LAWSON_FAX}} {{Contact flag2}} {{Endcovertext}} {{Fax flag3}} Tested on AIX

Thank you - that worked.