Question

a simple question please

i have this code, and it add the word echo for all lines, but i want exclusively to odd lines

i kwow that this code sed -n 1~2p’ show me all odd lines, but i can’t doing the same in script above

sed 's/.*/echo &/' $startdirectory

thanks

Answer 1

For a literal answer to what you’re asking (apply an ‘s’ action to every other line), you want

sed -e '1~2s/.*/echo &/'

This is marginally better than the N way of doing things in that it doesn’t interfere with other things you might want to do to other lines in the file.