> As I said in my second post, neither the field (the problem with sed)
> nor the string to be used as a replacement (no problem) is not known
> in advance...
> Apparently nobody reads but the 1st post... :)

why would it be hard to build up the regular expression
with a script?

something like this (untested, getting lazy)

# usage: buildre n replacement
fn buildre {
        re = '^'
        for(i in `{seq 1 $1})
                re = $re ^ '([^         ][      ]*)'
        re = $re ^ ([^  ]):\' ^ $2 ^ ':'
}

- erik

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