Hi All, I found this post from a few years ago. My question is Can I do it a litlle bit further: I wan to find out the first letter start with P and replace text( numbers) from 23rd to 26th, 43 to 46, and 63 to 66 with ****. How can I do it using a sed or some other better way. Thanks in advance I copied the previous post bellow here "Name: Matt Date: March 11, 2004 at 04:02:01 Pacific Subject: spefic SED replace command HI all I need to replace the 23rd character on all lines beginning with P , with a blank character. Ive heard that the SED command is the best option, Can anybody help with the specific command line that would perform this operation. Name: aigles Date: March 11, 2004 at 06:03:16 Pacific Subject: spefic SED replace command Reply: The solution with sed : sed 's/^\(P.\{21\}\)./\1 /' input_file Jean-Pierre."

correction: I wan to find out the first letter start with P and replace text( numbers) from 23rd to 26th, 143 to 146, and 263 to 266 with ****. How can I do it using a sed or some other better way. It seems not allow me to parse the 263 to 266 one my approch is like this sed 's/^\(P.\{23\}\)[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/\1****/' tmp |sed 's/^\(P.\{243\}\)[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/\1****/' | sed 's/^\(P.\{263\}\)[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/\1****/' | >tmp1 I got this error: sed: Function s/^\(P.\{263\}\)[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]/\1****/ cannot be parsed. even I split it into 2 line still got same error Please help

Post a sample from your input and example of the expected output.

My file has dozens lines and each line starts with 01~ has over 400 characters, other lines start with something else I don’t want to touch I want to replace the line start with 01~ for the position 23 to 26, 143 to 146, and 263 to 266 with ****. if it is number ( if it is blank then no change) Some thing like this: 01~12345……2222………… …………4444………… 02~sdfsdfasdfasd I want to change to 01~12345……****………… …………****………… 02~sdfsdfasdfasd