Login or Register to Ask a Question and Join Our Community


Shell Programming and Scripting

Placing a comment at the beginning of a line

Login to Discuss or Reply to this Discussion in Our Community

 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Placing a comment at the beginning of a line
# 1  
Old 05-04-2009
Placing a comment at the beginning of a line
Hello -

I am running Linux. I want to place a comment char at the beginning of a line in a file. For example:

testvar=`grep username /etc/people

sed -e 's/$testvar/#$testvar/g' /etc/people


I cannot get the above commands to put a comment at the beginning of the line.

Any advice is appreciated!
Thanks,
mike
# 2  
Old 05-04-2009
With awk:

Code:
awk '/username/{print "#" $0}' /etc/people

# 3  
Old 05-04-2009
Code:
sed -e '/username/ s!^!#!' /etc/people

# 4  
Old 05-04-2009
Thanks for the inputs. That worked!
Thanks for the inputs. That worked!
Login or Register to Ask a Question

Previous Thread | Next Thread

10 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Shell Programming and Scripting

Reading text file, comparing a value in a line, and placing only part of the line in a variable?

I need some help. I would like to read in a text file. Take a variable such as ROW-D-01, compare it to what's in one line in the text file such as PROD/VM/ROW-D-01 and only input PROD/VM into a variable without the /ROW-D-01. Is this possible? any help is appreciated. (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: xChristopher
2 Replies

2. Shell Programming and Scripting

beginning less from line #

Hi from a script i want to to read a file beginning at line e.g. number 21 to the EOF. less +n21 temp.txt Bevor the result, it brings an empty page, so that i cant use for scripting. Any idea how the problem can be solved? Thanks in advance! IMPe (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: IMPe
2 Replies

3. Shell Programming and Scripting

comment a line of the patterns is a the beginning of the line

I need to comment the lines starting with pattern "exclude" or "exclude=". If the work exclude comes at any other part, ignore it. Also, ignore, excludes, excluded etc. Ie only comment the line starting with exclude. File contents. exclude exclude= hi I am excluded excludes excludes= ... (9 Replies)
Discussion started by: anil510
9 Replies

4. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

vim copy line and paste at the beginning, middle, and end of another line

How would you do vim copy line and paste at the beginning, middle, and end of another line. I know yy copies the whole line and p pastes the whole line, but on its own separate line. Sometimes I would like to copy a line to the beginning, middle, or end of another line. I would think this would be... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: cokedude
3 Replies

5. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How to specify beginning-of-line/end-of-line characters inside a regex range

How can I specify special meaning characters like ^ or $ inside a regex range. e.g Suppose I want to search for a string that either starts with '|' character or begins with start-of-line character. I tried the following but it does not work: sed 's/\(\)/<do something here>/g' file1 ... (3 Replies)
Discussion started by: jawsnnn
3 Replies

6. Shell Programming and Scripting

Comment a line with SED

I have around 25 hosts and each hosts has 4 instance of jboss and 4 different ip attached to it . I need to make some changes to the startup scripts. Any tips appreciated. I have total of 100 instances which bind to 100 different ip address based on instance name. For example File1 ... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: gubbu
1 Replies

7. Shell Programming and Scripting

Using sed to comment out line in /etc/vfstab

I am running a script remotely to do the following 1. Kill all processes by a user 2. Uninstall certain packages 3. FTP over a new file 4. Kill a ldap process that is not allowing my /devdsk/c0t0d0s7 slice to un-mount 5. Unmount /h 6. comment out the slice in vfstab 7. newfs the... (9 Replies)
Discussion started by: deaconf19
9 Replies

8. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

how to replace a text of line with a comment line

I want to replace this line : "test compare visible] true" and make it "#test compare visible] true". How can I do it ? And it should be checked in many sub folder files also. (6 Replies)
Discussion started by: manoj.b
6 Replies

9. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

removing a line from a file and then placing into another file

grep `whoami` $1 >> file this lets me take out the username from a file and then i move it to a file but i need it to do one step at a time because i want the occurences to be numbered like 1)HOME=/home/joe.bloggs 2)LOGNAME=joe.bloggs instead of just HOME=/home/joe.bloggs... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: iago
1 Replies

10. Shell Programming and Scripting

Unix Script with line number at beginning of each line.

Could anybody help me. I need to create a script that reads a text file from STDIN and prints out the file to STDOUT with line numbers at the beginning of each line. Thanks. (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: mascorro
5 Replies
Login or Register to Ask a Question