UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Perfect.... so after all that wildcard isn't required if I know the start or the finish of the lines I wish to delete....I'd therefore only need wildcard if the sting is midline - where I can use .*[0-9].*

Outstanding effort.

Just to clarify, vi uses regular expression, as opposed to the shell expression you are probably more used to. The reason ".*" acts as a wildcard is that "." means "Any number or character". The "*" means "zero or more of the preceeding character". You could also use something like:
".+", which means one or more of the preceeding character (a non-null). So, Something like :g/S+[0-9]+/d could mean globally (g), search for a line with at least one "S" in it, with at least one number right after it, then delete the line...

It takes some getting used to in switching between shell and regular expressions... I still have a hard time with it.