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.