Shell Programming and Scripting

No, it does not. Only if embedded in the sed script given, it will, in two steps: first hour is replaced by an hour, then an is replaced by an an. And this is exactly what I said above: You'll need to keep it from being modified twice.

I'm sorry, by modifying sed example I meant embedded in your example prints "an an hour." I understand why (2nd statement matching "(a)n" from 1st...so how to fix?

Code:

sed 's/^\<hour\>/an &/; s/^[aeiou]/an &/; s/^[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxyz]/a &/ ' test > test2

---------- Post updated at 08:38 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:27 AM ----------
Don:
Thanks for taking the time to demonstrate awk example. I must have been confused before when I ran array ["hour"] and thought I saw the correct result. Just re-tested and indeed it doesn't work. So pipes | are used for complete words.

You might want to make sed quit after the first modification.

The pipe symbols in the extended regular expressions used in awk (and grep -E and some other utilities) separate alternatives. They don't have to be complete words. The line of code I suggested:

Code:

/^(heirs|honors|hours)/{print "the " $0; next}

could also be written as:

Code:

/^h(eir|onor|our)s/{print "the " $0; next}

(which looks for the letter "h" at the start of a line followed by one of the strings "eir", "onor", or "our" followed by the letter "s") and get exactly the same results with less typing. I just find the first form easier for many of the novices who read this forum to understand. (And the longer form keeps automatic spell checkers from trying to correct non-existent typos. )