Hi,

I need to do an exact find and replace (I don't want to use regular expressions because the input comes from user). I want to find a line that matches the user's input text and replace it with an empty string.

For example, let's say the user enters I love "Unix" and the contents of the file where I want to do find and replace is this:

I like "Unix" more than DOS
I love "Unix"
I said I love "Unix"
I love "Unix" a lot

man grep

read input
fgrep -vx "$input" file

read input
echo "$input" | sed -e 's/[][\\.*^$]/\\&/g; s/.*/s%^&\$%%/' | sed -f - file

Oh, and if you are really strict about bash, try this:

read input
while read line; do
  case $line in
    $input) echo ;;  # or not, if you want the newline gone, too
    *) echo "$line";;
  esac
done <file