Using sed

[Jza]

Hi I would like to know how to use sed and cron. I know this are both very basic tools but maybe because they are I havent been able to find a coherent tutorial that works with this. i am looking to do the following:

- Sed;

- search and replace

- insert a break line every number of characters

 

- cron

- set a cronjob

[scoonma]

Hi jza,

 

with sed you could to the following to search&replace:

 

sed -e 's/oldpattern/newpattern/g' file > newfile

 

This would replace all strings matching oldpattern with the string in newpattern in "file", writing the output to "newfile". Patterns follow the rules of perl regular expressions. You can find an introduction to regex here:

 

http://www.anaesthetist.com/mnm/perl/regex.htm

 

For cron, check "man cron", "man crontab" and study the cron related files in /etc. A good explanation of the structure of a crontab file is here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crontab

 

If you'd like to have some job done regularly, you can edit one of those files in /etc accordingly.

 

HTH,

 

scoonma