Shell Programming and Scripting

I want to insert text into a file using ksh script. The text is going above a closing </body> tag. In the text are two variables.

I thought I found how to do it, inexplicably still, using awk, but ran into some problems and time has gone by too fast. The problems using awk came when I added my second variable, however the problem might not be the second variable.

can you post some sample text and expected output

cat $reference | awk -v ref=$reference -v desc=$description '/<\/body.*>/ { print "<A HREF="ref">"desc"</A>" } { print }' $reference > tmp && mv tmp $reference

$reference = file location
$description = multi word string with spaces
-second line, I don't fully understand, maybe not enough thought, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

awk: can't open file and
source line number 1

-something odd about the space after and.

You should start by quoting the use of $description. Also, it cannot hurt to quote $reference to prevent issues should a file name contain spaces. You also don't need to cat the file; awk can read the file itself from disk.

Code:

awk -v ref="$reference" -v desc="$description" '/<\/body.*>/ { print "<A HREF="ref">"desc"</A>" } { print }' $reference > tmp && mv tmp $reference

The 'second line' (I assume to be && mv tmp $reference will move the temporary output file back "on top" of the original file if the awk completes successfully.

yes. i'll try it out.

---------- Post updated at 10:28 PM ---------- Previous update was at 10:22 PM ----------

very cool.