Korn Shell Programming by Example

Searching and Replacing

A variation on the cut-and-paste action is the search-and-replace action. This is useful if you need to make changes to every instance of a string within a file. The first step is the search. Searching is something you will do even if you are not interested in performing a replace. The following command places the cursor on the first instance of the string Den:

/Den/

Notice that no : exists in front of it; it is a command-mode command. This command searches forward from the current cursor position to the end of the file. If you want to search backward, you can surround the search string with ? instead of /. If the search finds an instance of the string, and you want to search for the same string again, you can type the ...