sed question

[ed91270]

Hi,

Easy question hopefully. I have a file with the contents

foo
foo

bar
bar
bar

foo
foo

And I want to add a line 'a pointless line' after the last line containing the string bar. How would I do this with sed ?

I managed :

sed ' /bar/ a\
a pointless line' < ./foobar.txt

which prints :

foo
foo

bar
a pointless line
bar
a pointless line
bar
a pointless line

foo
foo


So not quite the desired effect as I only wanted it to print:

foo
foo

bar
bar
bar
a pointless line

foo
foo

[robertdaleweir]

Hi ed91270
Hi. It would appear to me that if you want to parse a file and enter a line, as you mention after the last instance of <bar>, you must parse the file twice. Once to locate the last line where the <bar> occurs, possible by line number, and second pass insert your <line> at Line Number + one. Not sure how else you could know where the last instance of <bar> is located. Not sure this helps much. Cheers...
Robert