Hi Made In Germany,

Many thanks for your contribution. I was looking for a solution using Sed as I understood that Grep could not provide one! Tell that to Memorek! Both your solutions worked perfectly. The Sed one, however, wasn't half convoluted! Yet, whenever someone says something can't be done, someone else says hold on a minute I've just done it!

Your help is very much appreciated

No problem. Be sure to consider the comments on that method in #4 and #5 above. I left the grep in there because it wasn't clear what kind of pattern you were searching for, say if it was a PCRE expression. In most other cases you can fold the pattern into AWK and skip grep completely. There are also a lot of built-in variables like FILENAME which can help.

As for mastering the language, that would take a long while but the basic orientation as to what it's good at and how to use it can be acquired in an hour or two of concentrated study.

Or, in case you used grep -R, try find

Hi Shruggy, thank you for drawing my attention to that. On the same note, if I wanted Grep to cycle through all the files in the Z2 directory and also any other sub directories within the Z2 directory, is that doable? If so, how would I code it?
Thank you

See MadeInGermany's post directly above yours.

Bash also has the globstar option.

Hi Shruggy, thank you for pointing this out to me. On that point, how do I code it if I wish Grep to cycle through all the files in directory Z2 including any sub directories? Using /media/sda3/Z2/*.* doesn't seem to work. Sda3 is my data drive.

Hi MadeinGermany, thank you for your suggestion. To be honest I hadn't thought any wider than files in a particular directory. I had not considered that there might also be sub directories involved. I have run your Grep -R suggestion and it works perfectly. I appreciate your contribution very much.

Please pay attention. It's not *.*, it's **

globstar is a fairly new option in Bash, but it's in a lot of tutorials. Once one knows it exists, there are a lot of uses for it.