redirecting a file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have a normal txt file which contains say 5 lines. in that i need to change few of the the parameters dynamically.

for eg..

line 1..contains account
line 2 contains date
line 3 contains user
..
..
..

i will be taking the input using read command and store it in variables account,date and user variables..

but now.. how will i capture that in the txt file..

Pls help.

Thanks

2 
read account
read date
sed -e "1 s/^.*$/$account/" -e "2 s/^.*$/$date/"  file > temp
mv temp file

Similarly add commands in sed to change other lines.

3

sorry .. i didnt mention one thing..

How to read from the file.. or how to store the contents of a file using script.

i mean.. I have a file called total.txt and i want to take some data from the file to do some manipulations..

is this the right command..

a << total.txt

4

If you the know line numbers of the required lines then try this

a=$( sed -n "3,10 p" total.txt )

Retrieve text from third to tenth line.