Question

I want to write a script to be executed in the terminal.

I’m editing xml files and I want to add a string or strings after the head of the xml column is detected..

Here is a sample xml

bunch of line
more unimportant lines
and they can very in number
<States>
<item1> something something </item1>

<item2> something something </item1>

<item3> something something </item1>
</states>

Now I want to add an item 4. However, I want it to be inserted before item1.

Idealy, the file would when look like:

bunch of line
more unimportant lines
and they can very in number
and even some lines were added here
and here
and here
<States>
<item4> something something </item1>
<item1> something something </item1>

<item2> something something </item1>

<item3> something something </item1>
</states>

Note that there was other stuff added to the top that is irrelevent to the code. These are comments that are going to be going in.

I am open to doing this in perl, but shell would be even better.

Answer 1

You can try this assuming your heading States is fixed

$ tlines=`wc -l your_file | cut -f1  -d ' '`
$ lno=`grep -n "<States>"  your_file | cut -f1 -d ':'`
$ head -${lno} your_file > your_file.tmp
$ cat file_to_insert >> your_file.tmp
$ tail -`expr ${tlines} - ${lno}` your_file >> your_file.tmp

After this your_file.tmp will have inserted lines from file_to_insert.