Originally Posted by BubbaJoe

Your IFS is set wrong. THe IFS="" says there is no separator so the whole file is read. You can only use IFS is there is actually a seperator between each field. So cat $FILE will not give you line by line it will give you the while file as a field at once. Hence only matching 1 time. Since you really want look at each line as a record you should use awk or sed to find and replace the text.