Replace the contents between two lines specified by line numbers

Question

I want to replace the contents between two lines specified by line numbers using bash. For example. I have a file sample.txt, it has the following contents.

apple
peach
orange
juice
toy
computer
phone

I have a variable called var

var="cup\nbook"

I want to replace the contents between the second line and the 5th line(including the two lines) in sample.txt with the contents stored in var, so the final contents after the modification in file sample.txt should be

apple
cup
book
computer
phone

How to do that?

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-05T15:45:16.690

2

You may use awk:

var="cup\nbook"

awk -v var="$var" 'NR==2{print var} NR<2 || NR>5' file

apple
cup
book
computer
phone

Here is a sed solution that works with OSX sed (note definition of variable var):

var=$'cup\\\nbook'
sed "2,5c\\
$var
" file

apple
cup
book
computer
phone

edited Aug 05 '19 at 15:45

answered Aug 05 '19 at 15:03

anubhava

761,203
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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 05 '19 at 15:20

1

With sed:

var="cup\nbook"
sed "2,5c$var" file

answered Aug 05 '19 at 15:20

Léa Gris

17,497
4
32
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Thanks, but I found that this command didn't work on macOS, is there any way to make it work on macOS? – Searene Aug 05 '19 at 15:28
See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10748453/replace-comma-with-newline-in-sed-on-macos – Léa Gris Aug 05 '19 at 15:39

Replace the contents between two lines specified by line numbers

2 Answers2