cat piped to grep can check to see if a line of text contains a string. the sed command is more suited for editing files. Sed is a good utility to modify text. Sed is good at deleting strings and also substituing one string for an other.

Can it be automated? into a script

Anyway you can give an example of the syntax

for this example I will take the file an an input and make a new file as its output
this code will substitute all instances of 'string' with 'new_string'

if you want to delete all instances of string you would just substiture it with nothing

it would be very easy to automate it into a script

tried it and I can't quite get it right

Lets say I created a file called "hello" With the words username and password in it.

I wanted to change username to user

would I use

sed hello -i "s/username/user/g" ???????

ahh now I see correct syntax is

sed -i "s/text/changedtext/g" filename

Thank you for all your help

Chris

if hello is the name of the file put it at the end. using the -i option changes your original file. You would want to keep your original unchanged, so it can be used as a template.

this would change the original

a better way would be to make a new file
or this line does the same thing

the g means global. if you do not use the g, only the first instance of the sting is changed. In you case, you would not need the g

Is there a way to make this exression work

pwd | sed -e "s/home/httpd/vusers/*.domain.com/web_users/chris2 /chris.domain.com/web_users/chris2/g"

Chris

Since the forward slash has special meaning, you need to escape it. By placing a backslash in front of the forward slash, all of the special meaning is removed(escaped). for example my home directory is /home/shane. I will do an example that works