HOw can I find and change a series of words in a document? Using command line or VIM ...? thank you


Manrui

Using vim, the command is similar to sed:
:%s/<pattern to match>/<replacement>/

The "%" covers all of the lines in the text file.

Using sed:
sed 's/<pattern to match>/<replacement>/' textfile >newtextfile

sed would be better than awk for command line.

In vim or vi you can do something like:

:1,$ s/original/replacement/g

The above in Vim says to do it for every line from 1 to the end the rest of the line says to substitute the original pattern with the replacement pattern. The g at the end says to do it globally so it will do it for each occurrence.

I think that I would word that differently. Awk would be preferable for structured text files. Sed may be better for editing free form text. In either case, if the original pattern is split between a line, it may be better to use a sed script. You need to build lines in the pattern or hold space so that you can match a pattern containing the "\n" character. There is a book on Sed & Awk available on the web. ( It is the first edition that is available) The order of sed commands are important in a script and some possible input patterns can make the solution non-trivial.