Could someone please offer suggestions:

I am trying to search a textfile with hundreds of lines (records).

So I need to know how to search until the end of the file per each line. Within each line, I need to search for a particular string. If the string matches, I want to copy the whole line (record) into a new file (building a new file with the list of matching records).

Also, when I copy the record, I would like to place a 'insert into table(' statement at the beginning and then put a semicolon at the end so that I can execute the file as sql.

Please let me know if you have any ideas.

Thanks a lot!

sed -ne '/string2search/s#.*#insert into table(&;#p' oldFile > newFile

Thank you for your help. I tried the following but it copied all records to the new file:

sed -e '/MFP/s#.*#insert into table(&;#g' file1 > file2


The string that I am searching for is "MFP", the initial file is file1, and the new file is file2. Could you please tell me what I'm doing wrong. Thanks a lot!

sorry for the confusion - I've just modified my original post iwth the correction.

Wow, you’re a genius. It worked perfectly. It would have taken me forever to figure that out. Thanks a lot!

Can you please tell me what I would do if I don't want to insert the statement: 'insert into table (' and if I don't want the semicolon at the end?

P: Doctor, it hurts when I do THAT!
D: Then don't do THAT!

Cool! Thanks a lot