sed question: insert blanks or a string at defined position

[Klaube]

Hi,
i want to insert two blanks after column 8 in all lines of a file. with awk no problem, but is it possible with sed? thx, Ivo

[Roberto Polli]

for managing columns awk is better. with sed it's an harder work and could bear to prblems not easy to manage. If column 8 has particular form maybe can be easy.
With perl you can use printf and format which are built in function to print formatted output.
Pax, r.

[Rodney Hills · Accepted solution]

If you really need to use "sed", then-

sed -e 's/^.\{8\}/& /'

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Hein van den Heuvel]

If you really want to use sed then you could for example do:


sed -e 's/./&test/8' your-input > your-output

This says:

for every line,
substitute the '9'th match (s///9)
for 'any char' (.)
by 'the match' (&)
and the word 'test' (or whatever else you like to be there).

Hein.

[Klaube]

Thx to all, Roberto's hint solved my problem in the best way.

[Klaube]

Sorry, not Roberto's hint, but Rodney's!