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I've learned that the BSD version of sed included with OS X doesn't provide an intuitive way to add newlines. I've found a few notes about it, but I don't understand yet, how to extend the examples to solve my problem.

I need to append several lines to a file and found that the lines I add do not include newline characters.

My shell script currently contains the following:

sed '/match string/  a\
newline string' ./inputfile > ./outputfile

And, I'm trying to apply the tip I found here Newlines in sed on Mac OS X

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Michael Prescott
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1 Answers1

6

Nevermind. While reformatting the code portion of this question, a solution became clear:

I found that the following does exactly what I need:

sed '/match string/  a\
newline string \
' ./inputfile > ./outputfile
Michael Prescott
  • 4,071
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    To do that on a single line, you can use ANSI-C quoting to unescape \n. Additional backslashes are required before the newlines. echo $'111\n333' | sed $'/111/a\\\n222\\\n'. – Lri Jun 09 '12 at 03:06