hi...

i have a file with data and would like to insert a number and bracket 1) ...2)
at the beginning of every successive line; to add some formatting to the text

its ok i have solved it......

grep $USER file>> newfile
sed = file3 | sed 'N;s/\n/\)/' # this prints number for every line....with a very nice right bracket ie 1)...
2)...

thanks for all your help
i would be lost with out it....

thanks

Thanks for posting your solution. It is an interesting approach. Another way is to use the nl command. nl numbers lines for a living. Just doing "nl file3" won't exactly replicate the result you got with your sed processes though. First, by default, nl ignores blank lines and only numbers lines with text on them. But a "-ba" option will fix that. The next problem is that nl keeps the line number right justified inside a field that is 6 characters wide. I like that feature, although 6 is a bit much. To emulate your result of not aligning the line numbers we can set the field width to 1. And finally, nl puts a tab after the line number, and we need to change that to a right parenthesis. So:
nl -ba -w1 -s\) file3
will do what you want. There are also a lot of other options to control the output.

Thanks perder
that was really helpful

i prefer the quicker solutions