me>then XSLT is not your language of choice. You need a language tha allows
me>updaing of in place XML trees.

> I don't see why the OP doesn't simply do (apologies for the archaic shell 
> language):
> 
> copy file.xml input.xml
> xslt -in input.xml -xsl stylesheet.xsl -out file.xml
> del input.xml

It depends on the context (which I don't think has been given in any
detail) if file.xml is 10 terrabytes of stuff and you want to change 1
entry, writing a stylesheet to regenerate the whole database with
one entry changed might not be the most efficient approach, and using a
database language or just dom scripting to a writable tree might make
more sense than XSLT.

Me though, I do as you indicate above (although I've never used a
command line that has "copy" and "del" for "cp" and "rm" :-)

David

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