Question

I would like to add two lines after the first string search. I am using:

$ cat file1
HAI
BYE
HAI
ONE
TWO

$ VAR=`cat -n file1 |grep -w HAI |head -1 |awk '{print $1}'`
$ sed "$VAR a\
LINE ONE \
LINE TWO
" file1

It is giving the following output.

HAI
LINE ONE LINE TWO
BYE
HAI
ONE
TWO

But I want the output to be:

HAI
LINE ONE 
LINE TWO
BYE
HAI
ONE
TWO

How can I achieve this? I tried to keep the \n but it is giving errors.

Answer 1

Replace your sed command with this:

sed $VAR' a\
LINE ONE\
LINE TWO
' file1

btw your earlier grep, awk can also be reduced to this:

VAR=$(awk '$1 == "HAI" && NR==1{print NR}' file1)

Much Better is to get full answer in single awk command like this:

awk '{if ($1=="HAI" && done!=1) {done=1; printf("%s\nLINE ONE\nLINE TWO\n", $0);} \
      else print $0}' file1

OUTPUT:

HAI
LINE ONE
LINE TWO
BYE
HAI
ONE
TWO