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Accepted
Rasmus Faber
Asked: 2010-09-09 22:09:56 +0800 CST

Mail-merge like operation with sed (or similar)

  • 772

I would like to perform the following operation:

Given a file like this:

update FOO set STATUS="X" where ID=<REPLACE>;
insert into BAR (Z,W) values(<REPLACE>, 42);

And a file like this:

25478975
65897895

Give me a file with each line in the second file inserted in the <REPLACE> positions in the first, like this: 

update FOO set STATUS="X" where ID=25478975;
insert into BAR (Z,W) values(25478975, 42);
update FOO set STATUS="X" where ID=65897895;
insert into BAR (Z,W) values(65897895, 42);

It probably won't take me too long to write a simple Python program to do this, but I strongly suspect I could do it by combining a few GNU/Linux commandline-tools in the right way. Can anyone show me how?

linux command-line-interface sed

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    while read line
do
  sed 's#<REPLACE>#'"$line"'#g' infile.tmpl
done < numbers.dat
    • 2