sed substitution help

[gotchausa]

How do I search on a particular pattern, and if a line contains that pattern, add a comment in front of the line - leaving the rest of the line unchanged.

Input file: (I want to only comment out the line that contains 'WOW1' - not WOW11')

abcd WOW1 cdef
abcd WOW11 cdef

Output file:

#abcd WOW1 cdef
abcd WOW11 cdef

 

[CaKiwi]

Does

sed "/WOW1 /s/^/#/" inputfile

do what you want? CaKiwi

 

[vgersh99]

/WOW1[ ]/s/\(.*\)/#\1/g

 

[gotchausa]

Great! Both worked. I also discovered another solution:

sed "s/^.*WOW1 /#&/" input