How to add data at a specific place to a file

**polaris90** · November 9th, 2015

for example if I have the following data in a fie
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>What Can JavaScript Do?</h1>
<p id="demo">JavaScript can change HTML content.</p>

</body>
</html>

and I want to add "<food>" between the header and the body

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>What Can JavaScript Do?</h1>
<food>
<p id="demo">JavaScript can change HTML content.</p>

</body>
</html>

How can I issue a command to do this. I found online that I can use awk or sed but all the examples I found are for printing data and not adding it to a file. Can anybody help me with this one?

**sotiris2** · November 9th, 2015

Is the sed/awk output the whole file? In linux command line you can redirect anything output to the screen to a file like this. [code]command > file [\code]

Where command put the sed command & arguments and in file put f.e. edit.html but please not the same filename as the file you are trying to alter. If the edited file is correct you can then delete the original and rename it.

**matt_symes** · November 9th, 2015

Hi

You can insert a line after a line that contains a pattern match.

You need the -i (in-place) modifier for sed.

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<h1>What Can JavaScript Do?</h1>
<p id="demo">JavaScript can change HTML content.</p>
</body>
</html>

Code:

sed -i '/<body>/a <food>' test.txt

Code:

matthew-laptop:/home/matthew:2 % sed -i '/<body>/a <food>' test.txt
matthew-laptop:/home/matthew:2 % cat test.txt 
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<food>
<h1>What Can JavaScript Do?</h1>
<p id="demo">JavaScript can change HTML content.</p>
</body>
</html>
matthew-laptop:/home/matthew:2 %

You really need to read a good book or some online tutorials for sed though as the topic is large.

Make sure the book and the tutorials are for GNU sed.

Kind regards

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