First off, could you PLEASE stay away from the text formatting! Actually your text contained more formatting tags than actual text. If one tries to quote a part of it like i did it is hard work to sift through this endless stream of size- font- and whatnot-tags.

The problem is in the lines i quoted for you. All these lines are unquoted strings and therefore spaces are processed away by the shell. The shell has a so-called "internal field separator", which is the space char per default. This way the shell understands that you give two arguments (and not one which contains a space char) to a command in the following line:

Code:

command arg1 arg2

If you don't want this behavior, you would have to quote:

Code:

command "arg1 arg2"

The same is the case with your lines: if a part of a variable contains a space char the shell would see the following:

Code:

pattern1=`echo $i | cut -d ";" -f2`;         # before processing
pattern1=abc def geh;         # after evaluating the subshell

In this case the interpretable command would be "pattern1=abc" and "def" and "geh" would be treated as (indecipherable) other commands, which perhaps leads to some error message, in addition to "pattern1" not having the value you expect it to have.

First off, you really, really should not use backticks. Use them never, never ever, but use "$(....)" instead.

Further, in this case you should use neither because the use of "echo | cut" is completely unnecessary. The shell can do this well on its own and it is even shorter and a lot faster:

Code:

while IFS=";" read file pattern replacement ; do
     sed -i "s/${pattern}/${replacement}/" "$file"
done

Another thing is: you really should NOT use "sed -i". The reasons are explained here in detail. Use a temporary file instead and delete it afterwards:

Code:

while IFS=";" read file pattern replacement ; do
     sed "s/${pattern}/${replacement}/" "$file" > tmpfile
     mv tmpfile "$file"
done

I hope this helps.

bakunin