Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,


I am trying to replace a few lines with other lines of all files in a directory which contain those few lines.

say - there are some 10 files in a dir having the same 4 lines as 1.txt at the starting
1.txt
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
....................................
....................................
....................................


i would like to replace all the 10 files with these lines in place of the pervious four lines.

this is one
this is two
this is three
..........................................
.........................................
........................................


i was able to change upto a line ie one line with no new line character ,i could not do it for multiple lines.

here is the code for one line replacement

Code:

#!/bin/sh

echo "Enter the string to be changed :"
read stringToBe
clear


echo "Enter the string to be replaced"
read repWord
clear


for file in $( grep -il $stringToBe   * )
do
sed -e "s/$stringToBe/$repWord/" $file > /tmp/tempfile.tmp
mv /tmp/tempfile.tmp $file
done

could the forum help me in replacing old multiple lines with new multiple lines.

Traditional Unix text handling tools are generally line oriented, and don't work on contexts of multiple lines. Your best bet is probably to write a small awk or perl script. How modular does it need to be? Do you expect to need to do this often? On many files? Always at the beginning of file? How large are the files?

Or ... if you grab one file and can generalize from that, maybe you could do some in-line editing of the output from diff and reapply it to each of the other files in turn. Do you have the patch command where you are attempting this?