hello all, I have a to find and replace a strings in a file, for which I have a findstring.txt, which contains all strings to be found in each line and replacestring.txt, which contains all strings to be replaced in each line. I am using these two files on a targetfile.txt to find and replace using sed. findstring.txt and replacestring.txt may contain, strings with special characters such as '.'. When I run below piece of code, I dont see find and replace is working fine. I am sure, there is some pbm with sed syntax I used. Plz help me. #!/bin/sh files=`ls *.txt` exec 5< test/findthis.txt exec 6< test/replacethis.txt until [ $done ] do read <&5 myfindline read <&6 myreplaceline if [ $? != 0 ] then done=1 continue fi for myfile in $files do sed -e "s/$myfindline/$myreplaceline/g" $myfile > targetfile done done Thanks Arvind K

You are attempting to implement a replacement in sed. Arnold Robbins implemented a sed version in his "Sed & Awk" book published by O'Reilly. He called the command 'gres' - global regular expression substitution. See it here: http://www.sm.luth.se/~alapaa/file_fetch/unixcdbookshelf/sedawk/ch03_02.htm See the side-bar in section 3.2.11