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From: subbarao@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Kartik Subbarao)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: search and replace string from a script
Message-ID: <azKHdcfHGiZLQ@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 23 Apr 91 21:52:26 GMT
References: <1991Apr23.180034.7349@progress.com>
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
Reply-To: subbarao@phoenix (Kartik Subbarao)
Lines: 27

In article <1991Apr23.180034.7349@progress.com> root@progress.COM (Root of all Evil) writes:
>
>Is there any way within ex (or some other text processing utility) to
>access the nth occurrence of a pattern?  What I'd like to do is search
>a file for the nth occurrence of a pattern and then change that pattern
>but no others.  I've tried using ex:
>
>ex -s FILE << QUIT
>/STRING1/n s/STRING1/STRING2/
>wq!
>QUIT

If you have perl, you can say this:

% perl -pi -e 'if (/STRING1/) { s/STRING1/STRING2/ if (++$num == N); }' FILE

Isn't perl cool :-)

		-Kartik


--
internet# rm `df | tail +2 | awk '{ printf "%s/quotas\n",$6}'`

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