Apparently, though unproven, at 13:25 on Saturday 12 February 2011, meino.cra...@gmx.de did opine thusly:
> Hi, > > I am trying to instruct sed to insert a line of text before > a matched line. The whole command should fit into one > physical (command) line. > > Is it possible? And how is it possible? > > Thank you very much for any hint in advance! > Best regards, > mcc There's nothing special about a line, it's just a bunch of characters that end with a newline (itself just a character). But you can't insert stuff at arbitrary points, you can only replace stuff with other stuff. You can replace the start of line marker (^), so do this: $ cat sed.txt 1 2 $ cat sed.txt | sed -e 's/^/a\n/g' a 1 a 2 I replaced "start of line" with "a and a newline". Modify the regex to suit your needs. This gets awkward though, as you can search with a regex but only replace a literal. If you need to insert some line before any line containing say a "z" for example, then that is way beyond sed's capabilities and you are into awk|perl territory. You didn't clearly state what you are trying to do with examples, so the above vague wishy-washy goop is the best I can do for you. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
