Hi All,

I am trying to run a sed command to add a variable to certain position on a line of a file.

file is below (trailerfile)

TOT_______________________________________________________________________________________________To tal EUR0000000000001568.50

i have a variable called total which is already defined as a numeric value (0000000000001582.18)

the command im using is:
sed 's:\(.\{107\}\)\(.\{19\}\):\1$total:' trailerfile

but its returning:
TOT_______________________________________________________________________________________________To tal EUR$total


any advice how to make 0000000000001582.18 appear instead of $total?

Using single quotes will tell the shell not to expand the variable.

2 solutions: use double quotes:or using single quotes:

1) Please use ***[code][/code]*** tags around your code and data, to preserve the original formatting and to improve readability. Do not use quote tags, bolding, colors, "start/end" lines, or other creative techniques.

The long, unbroken lines in your post are forcing my screen to side-scroll. Edit it to enclose them, please.

2) Please try doing a search of past threads first. Questions like this tend to come up with good regularity.


In any case, this is a common example of how important it is to understand the shell's quoting behavior and argument parsing.

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Arguments
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/WordSplitting
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes


3) You can avoid most of those backslashes if you enable the -r extended regular expressions option.

See the section on basic versus extended regex in the sed info page.