UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Right now, my code is:

Code:

s/Secondary Ins./Secondary Ins.\
1/g

It's adding a 1 as soon as it finds Secondary Ins.
Primary Ins.: MEDICARE B DMERC Secondary Ins.
1: CONTINENTAL LIFE INS

What I really want to achieve is having a 1 added on the next line that contain "Secondary Ins." It should look something like this:

Primary Ins.: MEDICARE B DMERC Secondary Ins.: CONTINENTAL LIFE INS
1

Help Please!

If I understand you correctly, this should work:

Code:

sed 's/.*Secondary Ins\..*/&\n1/'

To introduce the new features in our match (search) string:
. is regex for ANY character
* is regex for the previous character can occur any number of times, from 0 on up

Replace string:
& is like a variable, it expands out to the content of whatever your found
\n is a newline

So we're searching for any lines containing "Secondary Ins." (escaped the . so it becomes a literal period, ensuring we won't match, e.g. "Secondary Insurance") and replacing them with themselves (simply put) and then adding a newline and a 1. Good?

Don't multipost. You already have a thread on this subject.

It's useful to know that he's using GNU sed on Windows, so probably can't use \n. He can't even split his regex across lines instead because it's being typed in a BAT file, not a shell script.

I gave him an answer in awk which I don' think he's tried yet.

@ryan: Thank you very much! This works perfectly! It's exactly what I'm looking for. Your post is very helpful. I do appreciate you went into details and gave me an explaination for it. Thanks once again.

@Corona688: Sorry, I didn't mean to repost. I originally asked how to work with the bat file but I figured that out so I thought I need to focus on what the actual problem is and just ask for the code part.

Thank you both for all your help

The syntax to type it into a batch file is often very different than how you'd type it into a real shell, and not actually using UNIX is really the sort of thing people should know when you ask a question about UNIX.

I had several solutions which would work in UNIX but wouldn't work in a batch file and eventually had to resort to awk. I suppose my version of sed is different from yours, even though they're both technically "GNU" sed.