Replace Strings with Strings from a file.

Lets see if i get what you have:

You have file1 that has:
<description>test.0</description>
<description>test.1</description>
<description>test.2</description>

You have file2 that has:
test.0 somenewname
test.1 anothername
test.2 completelynewname

After the script run you want for file1 to have:
<description>somenewname</description>
<description>anothername</description>
<description>completelynewname</description>

Is that right?

perl might be better if the above is representative of the data.
i.e. build a hash from the second file based on the name-> replacementname

file 2 has:

<description>somethingelse</description>
<description>somethingnotthesame</description>

i want file1's data to replace file 2's <description> tag

okay, i was mistaken:

i need to change between the descriptions in file 2

file one is the values i need to change them to, in sequential order. there is no reference between them otherwise.

Sorry if I'm overlooking the obvious, but if you take the values between the description tags in file 1 and replace the values between the description tags in file 2, don't you just have a copy of file 1, since the format of both files is the same?

Do the files have different numbers of records, which would make the resulting file different than either of the sources? If so, how do you want to resolve the differences?

i was wrong about file 2..
file 2 is just a list of values to put into file1's description tags, and they are different.

they are the same exact number of records.

that while read x; do echo "<description>"$x"</description>"; done <file2.txt works, but i need to replace the description tags in the files.

the second file has other data i dont want to damage.

ive tried this:

for i in $(cat change); do  cat tempate.xml |sed 's/<description>ifAdminStatus.*/<description>connection to '$i'<\/description>/'; done | less


but it replaces EVERY entry with the first line in change and it loops infinitely until i kill it.

I'll re-iterate arnold's request. Please post a sample of both files. As arnold said, once we know exactly what you're trying to do, it's simple to craft a short perl program to do it.