Thanks! Just the helpful nudge in the right direction i needed. as an aside, 
I just discovered that our RS/6000 seems to have no manpages on there at all 
 -- "There is not an entry for awk," "There is not an entry for sed", etc etc 
etc. Guess I'll have to wait til I get home to poke around on my linux box. 

Anyhow, thanks again, 

Nick 


> man sed.  
> 
> seriously, it's sed (stream editor) that will give you the search and
> replace functionality that you're after.  might want to make friends
> with awk as well. ;-) 
> 
> when last we saw our hero (Tuesday, Sep 16, 2003), 
>  np was madly tapping out:
>> 
>> Hello list,  
>> 
>> I'm working at a used bookstore, running a fairly archaic cataloguing 
>> program which runs on an IBM AIX server (Windows machines telnet in to 
>> catalogue, run point of sale, etc.) All databases are exported in 
>> tab-delimited text format, with whatever fields you have specified to 
>> export -- all standard issue stuff. We're beginning to upload our inventory 
>> to websites, and we need to do a little tweaking to the exported database 
>> file before we upload -- basically, we need to replace the terse condition 
>> descriptions we have on the database (limited to 8 characters!) with rather 
>> more descriptive versions for online browsers..  
>> 
>> So I need to write a script which does a search and replace (ex. search for 
>> 'NEW', replace with 'In new condition, with no blemishes," etc..) 
>> Unfortunately I'm pretty much a newbie when it comes to scripting - I've 
>> done some C, some (very minor) Bash scripting, but no Korn shell scripting 
>> at all. Could anyone offer any help in how to solve this problem? If 
>> someone could just point out a couple of commands (I'm looking into sed and 
>> awk, but not sure if this is the best place to start), I'll happily read 
>> the man pages -- I'd just like to get some tips on where to look first!  
>> 
>> thanks in advance,  
>> 
>> Nick 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
>> http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org
>> https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
> 
> -- 
> steve ulrich                       sulrich at botwerks.org
> PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7  AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC
 

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