removing specific characters on the file

hi. im new with shell scripting, please help me out.

i need to make a script that will scan/parse one file and remove characters/word within that file.

for example, file "abcd" contains this text:

"abcdefghijklmnopqrs lmnopqrsabcdfghijk poiuytrewqabcdmnbvcxz"

i need to delete the string "abcd"and replace it with space , so that the output file looks like this:

" efghijklmnopqrs lmnopqrs fghijk poiuytrewq mnbvcxz"

im using HP-UX. thanks!

you could try this perl statement. It works on Solaris. No promises for HP-UX though:

perl -i -pe "s/abcd/ /g" filename

cat abcd.txt | sed "s/abcd/ /g" >>junk.txt; mv junk.txt abcd.txt;

if you donot want the file to be changed then you can simply use

cat abcd.txt| sed "s/abcd/ /g" to get the output

Regards

Use "cat junk.txt > abcd.txt" instead of the "mv" command. This way will not change the file's permissions.

hth,
M.