can I use OR in searching or multiple search in one go before substitute command...someting of following sort.. :g/kamal/ g/preet/ s/me/myself/g where I find "kamal" OR "preet" in a line I substitute "me" with "myself" in all lines matchining any of two search criterion. Warm Regards Kamalpreet Singh

:g/kamal\|preet/ s/me/myself/g

James :g/kamal\|preet/p is not working in my cshell vi editor... I tried it in konsole (linsx m/c) there it is working. How can I use it on cshell vi editor. Warm Regards Kamalpreet Singh

Sorry, I do not know the cshell answer. But if your cshell can successfully run the following sed: sed -e '/kamal\|preet/ s/me/myself/g' myfile then one way of making changes within vi is to pass a specified group of lines (one line, one paragraph, entire file) to a unix command or shell script, and that group of lines will be replaced with the output. For example, to pass entire file to "mysed": In vi, position yourself on line 1. !G./mysed ./mysed is as follows: sed -e '/kamal\|preet/ s/me/myself/g' -

James sed is also not working in that way I tried "sed -e '/CAR\/PRL/ s/grenoble/Bristol/' sendfile.log" and this command of sed does nothing... what could be the problem? is there another way of giving OR operator ? Warm Regards Kamalpreet Singh

Kamalpreet, Yes, we can avoid the regexp OR operator by coding sed as follows: sed -e /CAR/ba -e /PRL/ba -e b -e :a -e s/grenoble/Bristol/ sendfile.log Here's what that sed command does: If line contains CAR, branch to label "a". If line contains PRL, branch to label "a". If neither of the above branches occur, then branch to end-of-line processing, having made no changes to this line. The command at label "a" is the change command.