Question

I have two text files, I want to place a text in the middle of another, I did some research and found information about adding single strings:

I have a comment in the second text file called STUFFGOESHERE, so I tried:

sed '/^STUFFGOESHERE/a file1.txt' file2.txt 

sed: 1: “/^STUFFGOESHERE/a long.txt”: command a expects \ followed by text

So I tried something different, trying to place the contents of the text based on a given line, but no luck.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This should do it:

sed '/STUFFGOESHERE/ r file1.txt' file2.txt

If you want to remove the STUFFGOESHERE line:

sed -e '/STUFFGOESHERE/ r file1.txt' -e '/STUFFGOESHERE/d' file2.txt

If you want to modify file2 in place:

sed -i -e...

(or maybe sed -i '' -e..., I’m using GNU sed 4.1.5.)