All,

Given the followng example, I have about 5000 files in which on the ACSENDDIR line below, I need to put in 2 backslashes for every occurance of a backslash that starts with ACSENDDIR or ACRECVDIR AND contains a backslash already. I am pretty sure I can do this with sed but have been unable to find anything on the net or man pages with regards to special charactors.

line....
line....
ACSENDDIR="\Inbound\3RDPARTY"
another line....
another line....

I need to convert it to this..

line..
line..
ACSENDDIR="\\Inbound\\3RDPARTY"
another line..
another line..



thanks in advance!

You have to escape the backslash...

sed '/AC[SR]E[NC][DV]DIR/s/\\/\\\\/g' file1

The above should work, if you need some more help try: sed examples

good luck