I'm trying to remove a specific line from a file based on a user defined input. I had found a similar situation where sed was used, but when I tried using it in my script, sed had trouble with the variable input, but would work fine if I put in a number within the text editor. Any suggestions on how I might be able to get this to work?

If you include a variable, the sed command needs to be surrounded with double, not single quotes HOME=/usr/home/bob sed -e "s/${HOME}/replacement_string/" filename sed -e "#~^.*${HOME}.*#d" filename The -v flag to grep says to print all lines except those contianing that string grep -v $HOME filename will print all lines except those containing /usr/home/bob If this doesn't help, please post what you have and someone can help you fix it.

Thanks for the help... I'm teaching myself shell scripting, so I still had a little trouble with sed, but I'm sure its because of my lack of expeirience. I did mange to get my script to work exactly as I wanted tho... heres how. The script first displays several lines from a file and numbers them, then asks which line should be deleted.... read NUMBER DELETE=`tail +$NUMBER file | head -1` grep -v $DELETE file > file1 mv file1 file I'm not sure if this is the most efficient way to get the job done, but it works fine for my needs. I'm always open to suggestions for better methods, as I'm just doing this for the sake of learning.

One more little speed bump... this script worked fine in a test, but when I applied it towards my actual script, I came across a problem, which I'm sure is something simple, but could not stumble across on my own. This is for an invoice program for myself.... the file contains lines that include... MM/DD/YY Dollar amount Client the spaces are tripping up my grep -v command. The line is called as a variable... grep -v $DELETE file > file1 I tried single and double quotes around the $DELETE variable, but it still get... grep: Money: No such file or directory grep: Clent: No such file or directory I just need to know how to get grep to see the variable as a single statement

Think I got it... I used... grep -vE "$VARIABLE" which seems to be workin fine