This line works from bash shell cli.
GNU bash, version 5.0.0(1)

But not if I place it into a bash script.

In cli is does just that, adds START END after permissions tag
In script, nothing happens.

Bad syntax inside a script?

sed -i -e "/\<permissions\>/a \<\!-- START -->\n\<\!-- END --\>" myfile

It may be helpful to show how it is used in your script. A quick test here works fine,

Some general comments, not specifically related to the script context...

From your description I think the escaped brackets probably have an unintended effect as they will match an empty string at those positions, not the opening and closing brackets.

I would suggest using single quotes to tone down shell expansions and all those backslashes are probably not needed either.

Note the effect of the escaped brackets in the second expression.

Either of these work in a simple script here, so it may be your script or environment preventing success on your end, so more info would be helpful.

script
I escaped < > and ! with backslash , without that it seemed to have issue on cli

It's Android OS linux, but bash should be fine.

The second expression matches the permission in "</permission>" because the <> and / are non word characters. The escaped <> work as a kind of more side-specific \b.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...pressions-vs-b

The pattern match should be a literal <permissions> , that's a tag in XML I need to append after.

Running it from cli I end up with
<permissions>
<!-- START -->
<!-- END -->

That is what I thought you intended, so you do not want to put a backslash before the brackets.

I am not familiar with the Android environment so perhaps someone else can explain the failure in script problem.

@OP How did you test your script? There might have been error messages you didn't see. Lack of write-access-right on the file, for example.

the most important things are:
1. add some error handling, and some checks in your script
2. use a log file to store those information
And you will see if (for example) file was not found, or sed was not found or anything else happened

With the backslash before < and > , it has no effect, at least not on cli. I did not try w/o backslash in script, but will try that.

Yeah, that's next step. It's just odd it works 100% from cli, but not when shoved into a script that runs via same bash shell.

My (admittedly fallible) arithmetic says this works out to almost $150K/year. Not too shabby...

Daniel B. Martin

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Yeah, but let me tell you why it sucks. I had that salary for past 20yrs, and I have been with only a few companies over that period, and I have advanced my skillsets and have made technical contributions to security industry! Cheap [add your fav curse word here] companies.

With some logging and looking, found my err.

There were no errors from commands.
Turns out one of my sed commands was doing what it said it should do, which was not what I needed it to do.
I however thought I was testing the sequence from script on cli, but maybe I wasn't. I am still thinking about that.
I reworked one sed command and now all is ok.
The error was happening prior to the sed command I listed in post #3.
solved.

btw, sed on Android is a link to toybox, as there is no sed binary on the system.

You'd be amazed how often that turns out to be the problem - in any language ..

I saw this statement somewhere: