Hello
I need to search for a mult-line text in a file exfile1 and replace that text with another text. The text to search for is in exfile2 and the replacement text is in exfile3.

I work with kornshell under AIX and need to do this with a lot of files. (the file type is postscript and they need to be edited before printing with our old card plotter that cannot manage bitmaps)

exfile1:
asdasdasdasd
asdasdasdasd
abc
def
ghi
sdasdasdasda
asdasdasdada

exfile2:
abc
def
ghi

exfile3:
jkl
mno
pqr

I have tried with sed with little sucess.
Any ideas?

You can't use sed because its processing is line-based. You can use awk if you unset the record separator, like this...

awk ' BEGIN { RS="" }
      FILENAME==ARGV[1] { s=$0 }
      FILENAME==ARGV[2] { r=$0 }
      FILENAME==ARGV[3] { sub(s,r) ; print }
    ' exfile2 exfile3 exfile1 > exfile4

asdasdasdasd
asdasdasdasd
jkl
mno
pqr
sdasdasdasda
asdasdasdada

Thank you very much for the solution.

Works great!

I have tested a little more and I have a problem.
All the files are bigger than 10,239 bytes and cannot be processed by the awk function.

Error:
"awk: 0602-534 Input line xxxxxxxx cannot be longer than 10,239 bytes."

Any idea to solve this problem?

Best regards
marz

I am doing awk on file size of 84461608 bytes without
any trouble . Can you please expalin what all you are doing on that ?

My guess is that you are:
1. Working on a different platform
2. You are woking with gnu awk, the OP is not.

This is the same idea as before but using perl instead of awk...

perl -e '
   undef $/;
   open(SEAR, "< exfile2");
   open(REPL, "< exfile3");
   open(INFI, "< exfile1");
   open(OUTF, "> exfile4");
   $sear = <SEAR>;
   $repl = <REPL>;
   $data = <INFI>;
   $data =~ s/$sear/$repl/g;
   print OUTF $data;
'