Using `sed` to add new lines

Introduction

sed is a powerful tool to edit files line by line. However, when you try to manipulate more than one line at a time, it becomes more difficult to create sed commands.

The point of this article is to find a pattern in a file and, when this pattern is found, add a new line just below.

The use case

Imagine that we have a lot of AsciiDoc documents. These articles have metadata at the beginning. However, the language is not defined, in any article. We want to add a metadata to define the lang of all articles (we know they all are in english).

For example, this is the metadata of this article

= Using `sed` to add new lines
:author: woshilapin
:email: woshilapin@gmail.com
:date: 30-11-2013
:slug: using-sed-to-add-new-lines
:category: tech
:tags: sed

We want to add the :lang: metadata after the :date: metadata.

The solution

With the sed command, we will use the a\ function to add a new line after the pattern we are looking for.

$ sed '/:date:/ a\
	:lang: en\
	' on-fichier.asciidoc

Notice that there is two new lines. The first says add a new line after the pattern you’re looking for'' and the second says add a new line at the end of the line I’m creating”. You may use the -i option of sed to replace in the file (the default is to print on the standard output).

References

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