Replace whole line using sed or awk

[Rolf Modin]

Hm...

awk ' toupper($0) ~ / BROWN[\.,!? ]/ {print "new row"}' input > output

This version acts only when 'brown' is used as a sepatate word, and not for instnace as 'brownies'. It accepts ".", ",", "!", "?" and " " as the character after 'brown'.

[Stephen Day]

A nice simple approach:

Say the string you are looking for is STRING_TO_BE_REPLACED.
And the line you want to insert is LINE_TO_REPLACE_WITH.
The input file is 'file', the output file is 'new_file':

cat file | sed 's/^.*STRING_TO_BE_REPLACED.*$/LINE_TO_REPLACE_WITH/' >new_file

The ^ is a start of line anchor, the '.*' is a wildcard, the $ is a end of line anchor.

Personally I think this looks a lot cleaner than most of the other ways to do this I've seen here.

[Rolf Modin]

shame on me!

This is how it works well:

awk '{if(toupper($0) ~ / BROWN[;\.,!? ]/) {print "new row"} else {print $0}}' input


The text "brown" will trigger a complete different standard line to be printed instead of the line "brown" is found in. But the line will only be replaces if "brown" begins with a space, and if the character after "brown" is one of ";.,!?" or space. The check will ignore case.

If it looks like "[" or "]" that should be replaces with sqare brackets instead.

[Rolf Modin]

shame on me!

This is how it works well:

awk '{if(toupper($0) ~ / BROWN[;\.,!? ]/) {print "new row"} else {print $0}}' input


The text "brown" will trigger a complete different standard line to be printed instead of the line "brown" is found in. But the line will only be replaced if "brown" begins with a space, and if the character after "brown" is one of ";.,!?" or space. The check will ignore case.

If it looks like "[" or "]" that should be replaces with sqare brackets instead.

[Robert Salter]

You could put it in a script if you have to do this more than once using a couple of different variables i.e;

# file1 contains line to insert
REPLN=`cat file1`
# or set the variable with the line to be #inserted
REPLN="dumb ol fox"

sed "s/^.*$2.*$/$REPLN/ $1 > $1.a
mv $1.a $1 # overwrite the original file

run it
swtchln.sh myfile brown

course there's lots of mods you can make to this, but you get the gist of it.

[Ross W]

close