On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 10:54 AM, chloe K<chloekcy2000 at yahoo.ca> wrote: > Hi > > I have a file. list.txt (two columns) > > column1 column2 > name address > > I need to put in the letter file letter.txt eg: > > Dear: Chloe > Address: CA > > Can I use this > > for i `cat list.txt` | sed 's/Chloe/$i.1; /CA/$i.2/g' $i.letter.txt > I've never seen any shell or sed syntax that allows you to subscript a line like this. You should read up on awk, although there is no simple way to do dual file processing along these lines. (An awk script for this would need to know it has two files to process and read in the first one, then print it with replacements from the second one.) Also, if the above were to work, it would be "for i in `cat...." - the "in" is part of "for" syntax.... Man pages are really handy for this sort of thing.... HTH mhr