Thread: Using sed

I have a huge list of phone numbers, each on its own line, in a single 130+MB text file.

I need to append (' to the beginning of each line and '), to the end.

sed, for whatever reason, doesn't like when I try:

Code:

sed -i 's/^/\(\'/' txt

it gives me a continuation prompt. After I enter a closing ' character, I get the error:
sed: -e expression #1, char 12: unterminated `s' command
However, if I try:

Code:

sed -i 's/^/\(/' txt

it works as expected. For whatever reason, I'm not allowed to escape the ' character in the first example.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Murray: That still give me the continuation prompt and, when I provide a closing ', throws the unterminated s error.

However, I did get a solution that worked. I also found a problem I was unaware of.

The solution was to enclose the s/^/... with double-quotes like thus:

Code:

sed -i "s/^/\('/" txt

Which, in retrospect, makes sense.

The problem I found (that I had been tearing my hair out over) was with the text file itself. For some reason, it was DOS formatted and when I tried a sed command using $ to indicate the end of the line, the replacement text would appear on the line below. After realizing this error, I used dos2unix on the file and was able to proceed without additional error.