Replacing text in a file from a list in another file?

Question

I asked this question before but don\'t think I really explained it properly based on the answers given.

I have a file named backup.xml that is 28,000 l

Answer 1

Using awk. It reads backup.xml file and when found a *** text, I extract a word from the list.txt file. The BEGIN block removes list.txt from the argument list to avoid its processing. The order of arguments is very important. Also I assume that there is only one *** string per line.

awk '
        BEGIN { listfile = ARGV[2]; --ARGC }
        /\*\*\*/ {
                getline word