Hello,

First off, thank you for your excellent forum. I am fairly new to Linux, and it has been a lot of help.

I would like to search through a file and insert a line of text from the command line. My file looks something like this:

a1 b1 c1 d1
a2 b2 c2 d2
a3 b2 c3 d3
a4 b4 c4 d4

I would like to find the string 'b2 c2' in the middle of one of the lines and then insert a line above it so that the final file looks something like this:

a1 b1 c1 d1
NEWLINE
a2 b2 c2 d2
a3 b2 c3 d3
a4 b4 c4 d4

I have a vague idea that awk can be used to do this, but I haven't been able to figure out the syntax. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

An AWK script consists of many statements of the form:
A pattern can be a regular expression, but it needs not to be. In your case you would use a regular expression for PATTERN:

This awk script should to the task you described: It reads each line and checks if one pattern matches. If the line contains "b2 c2", then the command between the braces will be executed. After that more patterns are checked and the action executed, if needed. The second line has no pattern. This means that any line matches it. $0 stands for the whole line. print will output its arguments to STDOUT.

To run this script, execute
You may have a look here:
http://www.vectorsite.net/tsawk.html

But for just inserting a line, sed will be better suited.

HTH

Forrest

Please show us what you have tried. Do you have to use AWK?

why not use SED, with an address and the "i" (insert) command?

Wow that was quick! Thank you everyone for your responses. Using this worked:

I was leaving out the second {print} previously.

Thanks, Irmin, for the link, the detailed explanation, and the suggestion to try sed. I will look into it.