How to add some text before another with sed in FreeBSD?

Question

How to add some text before another with sed? With GNU sed on linux I can make it like that:

sed -i "/\;Marker/i some text" conffile

It puts "some text" before ";Marker". But in FreeBSD I get an error:

sed: 1: "/conffile ...": extra characters at the end of l command

I need analog to use it in FreeBSD.

see https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#Commands-Requiring-a-newline — Sundeep, Jan 11 '18 at 08:47
https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/35227/22142 is one of the many posts that answer your question... — don_crissti, Jan 11 '18 at 14:20
echo "Marker" | sed "s/.*/praveen&/g" here I am adding Praveen before marker and it worked fine — Praveen Kumar BS, Jan 14 '18 at 14:36
Possible duplicate of [How to add headers to columns](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/401670/how-to-add-headers-to-columns) and see [my this answer](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/401695/72456) there. — αғsнιη, Jan 15 '18 at 07:34
Here, too, note that `sed` takes the `conffile` argument as commands to run, since `-i` eats the actual script. — ilkkachu, Jan 15 '18 at 07:37
@don_crissti No duplicate. It answers their question, but not their problem. (-: — Philippos, Jan 15 '18 at 16:27

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 15 '18 at 07:19

1

found this way:

sed -i'' -e $'/Marker/i\\\nblahblah\\\n' file

or

sed -i'' -e '/Marker/i\'$'\n''blahblah'$'\n' file

answered Jan 15 '18 at 07:19

rGA145

I think you only need to add an argument to the `-i` option, the rest of the script looks okay to me: `sed -i '' '/;Marker/i some text' conffile`. If your own answer works, accept it to close the question. – Philippos Jan 15 '18 at 16:26
That syntax does not work on FreeBSD `sed`. @Philippos – leo Aug 17 '23 at 03:31

1 Answers1