UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there,
I have a file with 1800+ lines and all are something like this:

drwx--x--x 12960 4096 Oct 6 2006 palfvoet
drwx--x--x 67205 4096 May 9 05:21 pallsopp
drwx--x--x palmgren 4096 Oct 6 2006 palmgren

now, as you can see, the middle one shows a time instead of a year, and every line in the file that has this needs to be marked with a * at the end of the line

I tried something like this:
/\:/,$s/.$/&*/g
but he just changed every line after the first one with a :

Anyone knows what I'm doing wrong?

PS: I'm using vi to edit this file

Why don't you simply use an output format which displays unambiguous machine-readable times to begin with? Maybe recreating the file in a more useful format is not an option, though.

I'm new to unix and this is just an exercise.
substitution and searching are the only things we've seen thus far.

You are mixing the range /:/,$ "lines in the range between the first colon and the end of file" with the range /:/ "any line containing a colon".