Shell Programming and Scripting

I don't think sed not able to substitute this change in Sun 5.8 and I tried that is not problem in mine.

Could you pls. show your file by:
cat test.txt
and then
sed -n l test.txt (note: that is lower letter of L rather than pipe)

I think your are missing the key point. There is no trailing newline. If you cat the file:

$ cat good_test.txt
abc abc
abc abc

Look at the file good_test.txt (with od -c):

$ od -c good_test.txt
0000000 a b c a b c \n a b c a b c \n
0000020

Let's make it a bad behaving file and strip out the newlines:

$ cat good_test.txt | tr '\012' " " > bad_test.txt

Look at the same file stripped of the newline (with od -c):

$ cat bad_test.txt | od -c
0000000 a b c a b c a b c a b c
0000020

Cheers,

Keith

can we have a solution to this
all that we have here is the workaround

from the above discussion
1. No solution with sed so far
2. awk has side effects
3. forcefully changing the file to have a newline and then sed'ing it (equi to the side effect of awk)

is there some way that we do not change the file and still get the desired result

lets say i do not have a option, but I have to keep the file intact with the last line without the newline character, then how do i substitue on this line without having the newline character at the end.

This will update the file and keep the incomplete last line

Code:

nawk '{gsub("abc","ABC");a[m=NR]=$0}END{for(x=1;x<=m;x++)
printf (x==m)?a[x]:a[x]"\n">FILENAME}' test.txt

Refer this

perl -i -pne "s/abc/ABC/g" filename


cortesy Wintellect, thanks pal !!!
Refer this also