Shell Programming and Scripting

I see your situation now..., not the perfect solution, but this might get you going:

Code:

sed 's: airplane : helicopter :g' filename 

# does not handle the case when line starts or ends with "airplane"

I'd switch to awk, perl,... for a more granular pattern check.

sed 's/[ ]airplane[ ]/ helicoptor /g' myfile

go through each word, and testing them against just the word "airplane"

Code:

awk '
{
  for(i=1;i<==NF;i++){
     if($i == "airplane"){
           print "Found airplane: " $0
     }
  }
}
' file

try this
sed 's/' airplane '/' helicopter '/g'
and
sed 's/' airplane/.'/' helicopter/.'/g'

the problem is . . . that your definition of word delimiter is different from sed's.
sed's includes any punctuation or any whitespace.

so.... we might do well with more information.

Are all these words in a comma-separated list, or similar?

Some words are in comma-separated list, while others aren't. That is what I guess makes this a very complicated task to complete. Never imagined it'd be this hard to replace words in a file.

well, anyway, a fun problem. Skysmart, try uploading a copy of the file and
let us all have a look.

One solution is to do something like this:

find all words that match any or all of your string.
( that is, the db-airplane, db-airplane.something, airplane ) etc...

Then, for any word that is NOT exactly airplane, go back through
the file and modify it first to something else.... for instance....
the capitalized version or tack-on airplaneDONOTEDIT to it.

Then, edit '\<airplane\>' as usual.

But to provide you the code for that, it would be helpful to have your original file.

I give the total estimate as 1 SMOP.