Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I guess by default SED looks for any occurences anywhere in the file or text. Is it possible to restrict the search to replace only for the complete pattern .

I have data file like

record 1->"abc abc123"
record 2->"123 aaaaa"
record 3->"./abc acacac"

i have a replace file

"abc"
"123"

I wanna replace only the record 1 and 2 as it matched the patern(abc & 123 respectively), for record 3 sed shouldn't do anything as the replace file do not have match for ./abc ? .

Is this possible ?

PS : Iam not stringent to do it in sed, even if 'tr' or anything works i would be ok.

I really appreciate any input.

Thanks

why dont u use "^" to check the beginning of the line
like
sed 's/^abc/tr/' file1
it will search lines starting with abc only

--Manish

Hi,

Unfortunately it may not always at the begining of line and if iam not wrong in sed ^ refers to non-matching.

Anyway, i could figure out something, but fiddling around to finid out a way

In vi we can use sed to replace by bracing the < and >, which works fine.

However I am not able to replicate the same in shell.

I tried to have the replace file withthe braces and escape chars
'\/\<CELL\>'

my data file : 1~hello /CELL

Iam suppose to replace /CELL in data file to 'X'

my code looks like :

Code:

while read dat_file;do
while read replace_file;do
sed -e s,$replace_file,X,g
done < replace.txt
done < datfile.txt

However whenever I read the replace file , it's reading as

Code:

/<CELL>

and never will find a match so no replace happens.
Even I tried with single quote, but in vain.

'/<CELL>'

So Iam kind of lost how to pass the text with / from the file ??

Also, the sed statement %s,\/\<CELL\>,X,g works in vi but not in shell

as far as my understanding goes ^ refers to same beginning of the line in sed also.. it doesnt refer to non matching...

Okay I almost nailed out , " double Quotes" with appropriate escape chars does the trick, but missing one and important thing towards the last step.

while read d;do
for l in `cat $2`
do
....
For the above code I could see the echo is displaying is the following
echo 1~hello /CELL| sed -e s,"\/\<CELL\>",X,g
above is correct statement when I execute from the command line. Ouput is
However when it is executed from shell script. It doesn't replace.
it simply outputs
Anybody can guess a reason ?
FYI, I tried on ksh,sh and bash.

try this

Code:

echo $d | sed -e "s,/CELL,X,g"

Hi Anbu,
thanks, it will work, but it will also search and replace as wildcard "searchsting*", but my requirement is to confine the search to the string,

i.e

d=/CEL
echo $d | sed -e "s,/CEL,X,g"
X ->fine and expected

d=/CELLU
echo $d | sed -e "s,/CEL,X,g"
XLU -> not expected,

I would like to replace only the if the match exist as complete word and not part of word.

thanks