Add to the end of the line containing the template - with sed or awk

Question

Here is an example file

somestuff... all: thing otherthing some other stuff 

What I want to do is add to the line starting with all: as follows:

 somestuff... all: thing otherthing anotherthing some other stuff 

Maybe I can do this with sed, but I'm not very good at sed, so can anyone help with it?

Answer 1

It works for me

 sed '/^all:/ s/$/ anotherthing/' file 

The first part is a search pattern, and the second part is a regular lookup using $ to end the line.

If you want to change the file during the process, use the -i option

 sed -i '/^all:/ s/$/ anotherthing/' file 

Or you can redirect it to another file

 sed '/^all:/ s/$/ anotherthing/' file > output 

Answer 2

This should work for you.

 sed -e 's_^all: .*_& anotherthing_' 

Using the s (substitute) command, you can search for a string that matches the regular expression. In the above command, & stands for string match.

Answer 3

You can add text to $0 in awk if it matches the condition:

 awk '/^all:/ {$0=$0" anotherthing"} 1' file 

Explanation

• /patt/ {...} if the string matches the pattern specified by patt , then follow the steps in {} .
• In this case: /^all:/ {$0=$0" anotherthing"} , if the line starts (represented by ^) with all: then add anotherthing to the line.
• 1 as a true condition, triggers the default action awk : prints the current line ( print $0 ). This will always happen, so it will either print the original line or the changed one.

Test

For this input, it returns:

 somestuff... all: thing otherthing anotherthing some other stuff 

Note that you can also provide text to add to the variable:

 $ awk -v mytext=" EXTRA TEXT" '/^all:/ {$0=$0mytext} 1' file somestuff... all: thing otherthing EXTRA TEXT some other stuff 

Answer 4

Solution with awk:

 awk '{if ($1 ~ /^all/) print $0, "anotherthing"; else print $0}' file 

Simple: if the line starts with all , print the line plus "anotherthing", otherwise print only the line.

Answer 5

In bash:

 while read -r line ; do [[ $line == all:* ]] && line+=" anotherthing" echo "$line" done < filename