Hello,

Thank you for providing more information. I think though there's still a bit more that needs explained before it can be determined what the best approcah here is.

So: you say which entries need to change and what they must be changed to depends on the hostname. Now, if that's literally true - as in, what happens to every single host depends entirely on human decision, and there's no actual pattern or thing in common that determines what's to happen to each one - then this isn't really scriptable. You'd spend longer writing a script to update the file than you would updating it by hand, since there's no rhyme or reason to the changes themselves, and they all have to be handled as individual special cases.

If, however, there's some actual set of rules or a pattern that governs what needs to happen to each host, then this can certainly be done somehow. But we'd need a complete and correct description of what those rules are in order to do that.

For example: are all hosts based on the Solaris template to go to a particular group ? Are all hosts with an HTTP check defined to go to a particular group ? Et cetera, et cetera. So long is there is a set of rules you can write down that 100% accurately describe what needs to happen to each host entry, this is probaly do-able somehow, though perhaps less easily than you're imagining.

But if there really isn't a set of clearly-defined and reliable rules you can always 100% count on to define each of the changes, then the changes won't be scriptable unfortunately.