More fun with sed

Problem to be solved - I was looking for a way to insert a line into a file ( it's actually related to Terraform but, for the purpose of illustration, it's just a text file ), using sed.

Here's a sample text file: -

cat simpsons.txt 

Bart
Homer
Lisa
Maggie
Marge

and I want to add a new cast member called, imaginatively, "Dave" into the list, between "Bart" and "Homer".

Here's how I can do it in sed : -

sed -i'' '/^Bart/a Dave' simpsons.txt

cat simpsons.txt

Bart

Dave

Homer

Lisa

Maggie

Marge

Of course, with a basic list of text, I could've just as easily appended "Dave" to the list, and sort it: -

echo "Dave" >> simpsons.txt && sort simpsons.txt --output simpsons.txt

cat simpsons.txt

Bart

Dave

Homer

Lisa

Maggie

Marge

but that doesn't work too well with a structured file.

Let's use a Terraform file for illustration: -

cat version.tf

 

terraform {

  required_providers {

    aws = {

      version = ">= 2.7.0"

      source = "hashicorp/aws"

    }

  }

}

where I want to insert backend "s3" immediately after terraform but indented with two spaces: -

sed -i'' '/^terraform/a \ \ backend "s3" {}' version.tf

which results in a nicely updated file: -

cat version.tf 

terraform {

  backend "s3" {}

  required_providers {

    aws = {

      version = ">= 2.7.0"

      source = "hashicorp/aws"

    }

  }

}

I <3 sed