Shell Programming and Scripting

I've been trying this, and can't get it right. I want to put a line break before a word, but only if it's *not* the last word in the line. So if the break work was "fish," then...

We want to fish tomorrow

...would become...

We want to
fish tomorrow

...but this line would remain untouched:

We hope to catch lots of fish

Code:

$ cat file1
We want to fish tomorrow
We hope to catch lots of fish
There's more fish in the sea
I love to eat fish fresh

$ sed 's/fish [^ ]*$/ \^J&/' file1
We want to  
fish tomorrow
We hope to catch lots of fish
There's more fish in the sea
I love to eat  
fish fresh

(^J comes from pressing Ctrl-v followed by Ctrl-j)

Try to show, next time, what you have tried, so that we could try to help your understanding.

If my code was worth showing, I would. Seriously, I did last time I asked a question.

I'm not sure I'm doing this right. In vim on Ubuntu, I'm able to insert the Ctrl-J, which looks like ^@, but it doesn't do anything except make my output file illegible in gedit. When I look at it in vim, it hasn't made the line breaks.

In that case, skip the Ctrl-v, Ctrl-j thing, just replace it by pressing Enter...

Code:

sed 's/fish [^ ]*$/ \
&/' file1