UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi

i want to write a search and replace script which should able to take any pattern or text to search in a input file and then replace it with the other word or pattern given

i was able to find many solutions for searching and replacing for a single word or pattern , like

Code:

sed 's/Search/replace/g'

and also using grep or perl etc

But the only issue am facing is when i have a wild characters in my input string like if i want to replace a string

Code:

"**** z002350***"
a) **** denote a comment in my program so it can have any number of * ( its not fixed to 4 *) and may followed or not followed by spaces  

b) is there any flag which can set the command not to expand wild characters while parsing
"

Can you please help me in finding the text as it is mentioned in input string and replacing it with the other string

any help is much appreciated , thank you

can you show us your Input file??

use back slash

Code:

sed 's/\*\*\*Search/replace/g'

i am looking for a command which can search for any text ( enable and disable regex because * will be treated as zero or more string ) , the input string may vary from one time to other , this time i have a input string of "**** z0023 **" but next time i may have another string like "****************** my comment****** " so i want to write a script which can handle any type of search and replace requests