Using sed within a shell script

[jprabaker]

Hi,

I'm new to using sed. I'm trying to create a simple sed command in my script to search a file by a unix variable and then append text to matching lines. I've tried:

more filename |sed '/$VARIABLE/s/ *$/appended text'

but this doesn't seem to do anything.

Could someone advise?

Regards,

 

[MikeLacey]

Your single quotes in the sed command are stopping the variable being interpreted.

To illustrate, try this:

x='abc'
print "$x"
print '$x'

Try double quotes in your command and see how you go. Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com
Email welcome if you're in a hurry or something -- but post in tek-tips as well please, and I will post my reply here as well.

 

[misercord]

The *$ is matching the whole line. You only want to match the end of the line. Try this.

sed -e"/$MYVAR/s/$/#comment/" file > newfile