Moderator's Comments:

@Ravinder: Yes, it is perfectly OK to remind people to read the man pages. This point can never be stressed enough. On the other hand, "read the man page" or "search the web" without even so much as a pointer what to search for is not all that much helpful. I might be naive, but many years of answering questions here still failed to make me jaded enough to suppose ill intentions every time. If someone writes a question i prima facie suppose s/he has already undergone some effort and came up blank - if only because s/he lacked the correct keywords to search for. Many thanks for your consideration.

You might want to concentrate on the "r" subcommand, which takes a file argument.

It will not be easy to directly replace a part of a line by the content of a file. To it seems like this is one of the very few occasions where you need to pipe the output of one sed into another. Consider the following:

inputfile:

Code:

===== line 1 =====
===== line 2 =====

replacementfile:

Code:

this
will
go
in

Script:

Code:

sed '1 r replacementfile'

Result:

Code:

===== line 1 =====
this
will
go
in
===== line 2 =====

The "r" subcommand takes a file parameter and places the contents of this file into the output stream. Notice, that this is NOT a replacement! The content of the file does NOT land on the pattern space and therefore you cannot further manipulate the result.

This is why i said you might need two seds, piping the output of the first (where the file content insertion takes place) into the other (where further manipulation might take place.

I hope this helps.

bakunin