Question

I have been trying quite a few ways with no luck. I have a file named test.txt that has some lorem ipsum and the text [staging: production] I simply want to add a few lines that I have saved in a variable in before it.

If you could explain where I have gone wrong with any of the below it would be much appreciated!

#!/bin/bash

test="lala\
kjdsh"

sed '/^#$/{N; /[staging: production]/ i \
<Location /cgis> \
</Location>\

}' ./test.txt


sed -i -e 's/\[staging\: production\]/\$test/g' ./test.txt
#sed -i 's/Lorem/beautiful/g' test.txt

#awk -v data=$test '{A[NR]=$0}/\[staging\: production\]/{ print data }' test.txt > testfile.txt

#read -a text <<<$(cat test.txt)
#echo ${#text[@]}
#for i in ${text[@]};
#do
#   echo -n $i;
#   sleep .2;
#done

#ed -s test.txt <<< $'/\[staging\: production\]/s/lalalala/g\nw'

#awk -v data=$test '/\(/\[staging\: production\]\)/ { print data }' test.txt > testfile.txt

# && mv testfile.txt test.txt

#sed -i -e '/\(\[staging\: production\]\)/r/$test\1/g' test.txt

#sed "/\(\[staging\: production\]\)/s//$test\1/g" test.txt

Answer 1

sed -i -e 's/\[staging\: production\]/\$test/g' ./test.txt

won’t work because inside singe quotes BASH will not expand \$test.
Therefore you don’t need to escape the $.

If you want to substitute with the contents of the variable $test do:

sed -i -e 's/\[staging: production\]/'$test'/g' ./test.txt

You also do not need to escape :

To insert before your pattern works for me this way:

sed -i -e '/\[staging: production\]/ i '$test'' ./test.txt

However to preserve the linebreak inside the variable I needed to define:

test="lala\nkjdsh"

Please note the \n to encode the linebreak.