Reputation: 550
I'm trying to insert text to the third line in a file using sed, and the syntax I've found on other forums is:
sed -i '' "3i\ text to insert" file
When I use this however, I get an error:
sed: 1: "3i\ text to insert": extra characters after \ at the end of i command
I can't seem to figure out what is causing the problem. I'm using OSX, which is why I have an empty ' ' as my extension.
Thanks!
Upvotes: 39
Views: 37704
Reputation: 997
To insert text to the first line and put the rest on a new line using sed on macOS this worked for me
sed -i '' '1 i \
Insert
' ~/Downloads/File-path.txt
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 11
I've found that I have to insert a \ at the end of the line to be inserted, otherwise it concatenates it at the beginning of the original line. So, if I want to insert a new third line,...
sed -i '' '3i\<br>
New line to be inserted.\<br>
' file
Upvotes: 1
Reputation: 3861
A one-liner for OSX employing ANSI-C quoting:
sed -i '' '3i\'$'\n''text to insert' file
Adapted from https://stackoverflow.com/a/24299845/901597
Upvotes: 13
Reputation: 74695
You should put a newline directly after the \
:
sed '3i\
text to insert' file
This is actually the behaviour defined by the POSIX specification. The fact that GNU sed allows you to specify the text to be inserted on the same line is an extension.
If for some reason you need to use double quotes around the sed command, then you must escape the backslash at the end of the first line:
sed "3i\\
text to insert" file
This is because a double-quoted string is processed first by the shell, and \
followed by a newline is removed:
$ echo "abc\
def"
abcdef
Upvotes: 61
Reputation: 603
If you want to modify a file of specific file type(.sh in my case) use this command.
sed -i '.sh' '3i\
mymodified text to insert' temp.sh
Make sure you have line break after slash ("\")
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 181
Here's how to do it in one line syntax
sed -i '' -e "2s/^//p; 2s/^.*/text to insert/" file
duplicate second line: 2s/^//p;
replace new line with your text: 2s/^.*/text to insert/
Upvotes: 9