Question

Ok I am locked in a situation where I am trying to insert a line based on a search string . I am familiar doing this w AWK and SED using a single work or something uncomplicated.

How I’d like to insert a string that has Single Quotes and Brackets
e.g.
this will work

     awk '/('Backup/ {print "NEWLINE"  } {print}' filename.sh 

and so will this

    sed -e '/\(\'backup/i\
    newline ' filename.sh

Instead of newline work- I want this ” (‘Drop the no good white.cap ;’ ) , “

everything enclosed within the ” and ”

Answer 1

What you’re trying to do has nothing to do with awk or sed. For example, see:

print " '\'' data_between_two_single_quotes '\'' "

The first ' character closes the opening ' shell string literal. The shell literal does not support a backslash escape for this. The sequence '\'' does the trick: it closes the single-quote literal, specifies the quote character (using an escape that is supported outside of single-quote literals) and then re-opens a new single-quote literal. You can think of it as a four-character escape sequence to get a single quote.

So, your awk command becomes:

awk '/\('\''Backup/ {print " ('\''Drop the no good white.cap ;'\'' ) , " } { print }' filename.sh 

And your sed command becomes:

sed -e '/\('\''Backup/i\
('\''Drop the no good white.cap ;'\'' ) , ' filename.sh

---

EDIT:

for i in *; do awk -v database="$DB" -v table="$TB" 'BEGIN { print "header" } /backup/ { print " ('\''DROP TABLE " database "." table ";'\'' ) , " }1' "$i" > "${i}.new"; done

Explanation:

Loop over all files in the directory using a shell for loop. Add a header to the files with the BEGIN block. Find the word backup and print a line containing the shell variables DB and TB. ... }1' at the end of the awk script enables printing by default. It’s shorthand for { print }. HTH.