For some reason I can't seem to find a straightforward answer to this and I'm on a bit of a time crunch at the moment. How would I go about inserting a choice line of text after the first line matching a specific string using the sed command. I have ...
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
And I want insert a line after the CLIENTSCRIPT= line resulting in ...
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
The awk variant :
awk '1;/CLIENTSCRIPT=/{print "CLIENTSCRIPT2=\"hello\""}' file
I had to do this recently as well for both Mac and Linux OS's and after browsing through many posts and trying many things out, in my particular opinion I never got to where I wanted to which is: a simple enough to understand solution using well known and standard commands with simple patterns, one liner, portable, expandable to add in more constraints. Then I tried to looked at it with a different perspective, that's when I realized i could do without the "one liner" option if a "2-liner" met the rest of my criteria. At the end I came up with this solution I like that works in both Ubuntu and Mac which i wanted to share with everyone:
insertLine=$(( $(grep -n "foo" sample.txt | cut -f1 -d: | head -1) + 1 ))
sed -i -e "$insertLine"' i\'$'\n''bar'$'\n' sample.txt
In first command, grep looks for line numbers containing "foo", cut/head selects 1st occurrence, and the arithmetic op increments that first occurrence line number by 1 since I want to insert after the occurrence. In second command, it's an in-place file edit, "i" for inserting: an ansi-c quoting new line, "bar", then another new line. The result is adding a new line containing "bar" after the "foo" line. Each of these 2 commands can be expanded to more complex operations and matching.
Sed command that works on MacOS (at least, OS 10) and Unix alike (ie. doesn't require gnu sed like Gilles' (currently accepted) one does):
sed -e '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/a\'$'\n''CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
This works in bash and maybe other shells too that know the $'\n' evaluation quote style. Everything can be on one line and work in older/POSIX sed commands. If there might be multiple lines matching the CLIENTSCRIPT="foo" (or your equivalent) and you wish to only add the extra line the first time, you can rework it as follows:
sed -e '/^ *CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/b ins' -e b -e ':ins' -e 'a\'$'\n''CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' -e ': done' -e 'n;b done' file
(this creates a loop after the line insertion code that just cycles through the rest of the file, never getting back to the first sed command again).
You might notice I added a '^ *' to the matching pattern in case that line shows up in a comment, say, or is indented. Its not 100% perfect but covers some other situations likely to be common. Adjust as required...
These two solutions also get round the problem (for the generic solution to adding a line) that if your new inserted line contains unescaped backslashes or ampersands they will be interpreted by sed and likely not come out the same, just like the \n is - eg. \0 would be the first line matched. Especially handy if you're adding a line that comes from a variable where you'd otherwise have to escape everything first using ${var//} before, or another sed statement etc.
This solution is a little less messy in scripts (that quoting and \n is not easy to read though), when you don't want to put the replacement text for the a command at the start of a line if say, in a function with indented lines. I've taken advantage that $'\n' is evaluated to a newline by the shell, its not in regular '\n' single-quoted values.
Its getting long enough though that I think perl/even awk might win due to being more readable.
Note the standard sed syntax (as in POSIX, so supported by all conforming sed implementations around (GNU, OS/X, BSD, Solaris...)):
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT=/a\
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
Or on one line:
sed -e '/CLIENTSCRIPT=/a\' -e 'CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
(-expressions (and the contents of -files) are joined with newlines to make up the sed script sed interprets).
The -i option for in-place editing is also a GNU extension, some other implementations (like FreeBSD's) support -i '' for that.
Alternatively, for portability, you can use perl instead:
perl -pi -e '$_ .= qq(CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"\n) if /CLIENTSCRIPT=/' file
Or you could use ed or ex:
printf '%s\n' /CLIENTSCRIPT=/a 'CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' . w q | ex -s file
I had a similar task, and was not able to get the above perl solution to work.
Here is my solution:
perl -i -pe "BEGIN{undef $/;} s/^\[mysqld\]$/[mysqld]\n\ncollation-server = utf8_unicode_ci\n/sgm" /etc/mysql/my.cnf
Explanation:
Uses a regular expression to search for a line in my /etc/mysql/my.cnf file that contained only [mysqld] and replaced it with
[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
effectively adding the collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci line after the line containing [mysqld].
Maybe a bit late to post an answer for this, but I found some of the above solutions a bit cumbersome.
I tried simple string replacement in sed and it worked:
sed 's/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
& sign reflects the matched string, and then you add \n and the new line.
As mentioned, if you want to do it in-place:
sed -i 's/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Another thing. You can match using an expression:
sed -i 's/CLIENTSCRIPT=.*/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Hope this helps someone
A POSIX compliant one using the s command:
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/s/.*/&\
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Source: Stackoverflow.com