UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Dear friends please help,

I have a large data file with few hundred lines. A small example is shown below:

datafile is a file with few hundred lines with the third column has many different character stings:

test 100 abc
test 134 bcd
test 356 cdf
test 831 dfg
test 720 fgh

I need to find these character abc and replace it with John, bcd and replace it with Mike, cdf and replace it with Tom, dfg and replace it with Kelvin, and fgh and replace it with Andy

Once I finish the find and repacement my file should be:

test 100 John
test 134 Mike
test 356 Tom
test 831 Kelvin
test 720 Andy

I started with something this but it did not work:

sed 's/abc/John/g' datafile > temp
rm datafile
sed 's/bcd/Mike/g' temp > datafile
rm temp
sed 's/cdf/Tom/g' datafile > temp
rm datafile
sed 's/dfg/Kelvin/g' temp > datafile
rm temp
sed '/fgh/Andy/g' datfile > temp

Please help...I am very new with Unix..I am self learning the language for 2 weeks now!

what do you mean by it didnt work, was there no output, or was the output not as expected was there error in your commands. to figure out the solution we need to first figure out what went wrong, then we can find where to fix it, isnt it.
what i think is the above should work. and to do a multiple search and replace you can use the -e flag with sed. so you can do

sed -e 's/abc/John/g' -e 's/bcd/Mike/g' -e 's/cdf/Tom/g' ...... datafile > temp

dont take those dots literally, they represent you can add more -e commands

It works! Thank you very much!

Now I have other problems:

in Microsoft Excel the have these data:

-e 's/abc/john/g'
-e 's/dcf/tom/g'
-e 's/hgh/mike/g'

and many more lines.

How can I combine these lines in the form that Unix can read? Which is :

-e 's/abc/john/g' -e 's/dcf/tom/g' -e 's/hgh/mike/g'.......datafile > temp

Please advise

I copy these lines in excel paste it in notepad and it give line per line.

bobo, copy all the lines down within excel and go to the Edit->Paste especial and use "transpose".

Thank you for your reply! Transpose do not work! I use concatenate(a1,a2,....only up to 30) I have 500 lines!

It worked for me. See the images attachments.

Thank you very much!