Inserting a carriage rtn in a sed cmd

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I suppose this is a silly newbie Q, but I have a set of text I am inserting into a file using a sed cmd and before I insert, I want to ask the sed operation to move to add a carriage return first, and then place my new line.

Is there scope within the sed command to do this - i have tried "\n" as follows with obivous run-time errors:-

$cat fileToEdit | sed -e $lineToEnterNewText's/$oldline \n $newText/' > fileToEdit

Thanks

2

$ cat fileToEdit | sed -e "$lineToEnterNewText"' s/^\(.*\)$/\1\
'"$newText"'/' > fileToEdit

3

Some versions of sed recognize escape sequences:

echo tvparty |sed 's/\(tv\)\(party\)/\1\n\2/g'

For example, I'm using GNU sed...

4

In sed in match part of s/// escape sequence (\n) can be used, in replace part - only newline (as I've shown above)

5

I may have misunderstood, but I think you are correct - sed has a hard time matching newline, but it can insert a newline (depending on version, as I said before.) However, on second review, it looks like he may have wanted to add newline to the start of a line...
If we can remove sed, why not ' printf "\n$string" '?

If I didn't get it right this time, mea culpa.

6

ha? then we'll get 2 lines :slight_smile:

7

Strange, neither of the ways work on my sed version..? although it does say in the info page - version 3.02 of GNU Sed.