Hi Experts: I would like to do a wild card subtitution on a file. In this file, it contains these: .f(we_rtf123_orty4); .f(rf_RED_234_p23455oi); I would like to global replace all the characters inside with blank. i.e f(we_rtf123_orty4); with .f( ); I need to use wild card since I have so many lines I need to replace and each of the word are unique and the word length are different in size. Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated. Thanks, gotme

sed -e "s/(.*)/( )/g" < filename

Thanks for the reply lankryt0. Unfortunatley, I go this message sed: command garbled: s/(.*)/( )g gotme

the command is: sed -e "s/(.*)/( )/g" < filename you are missing the / before the g at the end

Thanks for catching the error. A bit better but not what I want. It is replacing all the word inside the bracket to blank but it also remove the .f. I want it to be like .f() not (). Thanks.

strange, when I run the command, that is what I get: user@machine:~/test> sed "s/(.*)/( )/g" < infile .f( ); .f( ); .f( ); .f( ); .f( ); .f( ); user@machine:~/test> sed --version GNU sed version 4.0.9 Infile looks like: .f(we_rtf123_orty4); .f(rf_RED_234_p23455oi); .f(we_rtf123_orty4_asdf); .f(rf_RED_234_p23455oi_sdasd); .f(we_rtf123_orty4_we_rtf123_orty4); .f(rf_RED_234_p23455oi_we_rtf123_orty4);

Thanks lankrypt0! It works after I ran it again. Don't know what happened. I appreciated all your assistance. Gotme