You can do it that way, but it is probably easier to do the changes in a single sed run. It is possible to combine several sed-commands to a single script:

Code:

cat file | sed -n 's/ /,/;s/ /,/;s/ /,/;s/ /,/;s/ /,/p' > newfile

Of course it is possible to create a more complex regexp to change the first four spaces to commas in one sed-command, but it will probably be not any faster (or any more readable) than the presented solution:

Code:

cat file | sed 's/^\([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) /\1,\2,\3,\4,/' > newfile

I hope this helps.

bakunin