commenting/uncommenting a particular line in place

[Paul Schmehl]

--On Thursday, October 14, 2004 01:02:23 AM -0700 Mark Jayson Alvarez 
<jay2xra at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Good Day,
>     I'm looking for a command combinations (not and
> editor) that would uncomment or comment a line in any
> configuration file such as inetd.conf with just one
> single stroke.
>
> For example here's the line in inetd.conf that will
> enable ftpd:
>
>
># ftp    stream  tcp     nowait root
> /usr/libexec/ftpd       ftpd -l
>
> sure, I can extract that particular line using cat and
> grep, but I'm not quit sure how am I going to edit it.
>
> If it is commented by default, I can just say:
> cat /etc/inetd.conf |grep #ftp |grep -v 6 |sed -e
> 's/#//'  to extract and edit that particular line and
> then pipe the output to 'tee -a' to be able to append
> it at the bottom of inetd.conf.
>
> But what if it's already uncommented?

What's wrong with what you've already got?

cat /etc/inetd.conf | grep -v "#" | grep ftp | grep -v 6 | sed -e 's//#/'

Paul Schmehl (pauls at utdallas.edu)
Adjunct Information Security Officer
The University of Texas at Dallas
AVIEN Founding Member
http://www.utdallas.edu