Question

I’m writing a Bourne Shell script to automatically edit a source file.

I get the line number I need like this:

line=`sed -n '/#error/=' test.h`
line=$[$line - 2]

Now I want to insert a few lines of text after this line number, how can I do this?

Answer 1

If you have the simple unix editor ed installed, you can say something like this:

echo "$line i
$lines
.
w
q
" | ed filename.txt

This is vi without the “visual” mode. $line must be the line number and $lines the text to insert into the file.