Inserting string from xargs into another string

Question

Say I have some command that outputs a bunch of strings. The output from this command could look something like:

...
foo
bar
blargh
...

Say I have some set string

myString$Blah

I want to insert each of the strings where the $ is in the output of the command such that I end up with a file that looks like this:

...
myStringfooBlah
myStringbarBlah
myStringblarghBlah
...

What is the easiest way to accomplish this? (Awk and sed preferred)

Answer 1

You don't even need sed or awk.

xargs can do this: with: -L1 -I '$' echo 'myString$Blah'

$ cat x.list
foo
bar
blargh
$ cat x.list | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 -L1 -I '$' echo 'myString$Blah'
myStringfooBlah
myStringbarBlah
myStringblarghBlah

Answer 2

You can do this completely in the shell (bash, at least) without too much trouble. Here's a script that does that:

#!/bin/bash

pattern="$1"
input_file="$2"
output_file="$3"

saved_IFS="$IFS"
IFS=$'\n'
# Store each line of the input file into an array named 'lines'.
lines=($(< $input_file))
IFS="$saved_IFS"

# Truncate output file, if any.
cat /dev/null > $output_file

# Substitute each line into the pattern, and write to output file.
for ln in "${lines[@]}"
do
  echo ${pattern/$/$ln} >> $output_file
done

Supposing this script is called script, and you have a file called in.txt with one string per line, then running script in.txt out.txt would give you the desired output in out.txt.

Answer 3

Assuming you can use the format string myString&Blah, with an ampersand instead of the dollar sign, pipe your output into this:

sed "s/.*/$format/"

This works because the & is used as an "insert match here" operator in the replacement string. The regex matches the entire line, so it will insert the whole line at the &.

It is important to use the double quotes to allow expansion of the format string.

If you really need to use the ampersand, use this:

sed "s/.*/$(echo "$format" | tr '$' '&')/"

The quotes around $format are important if you have whitespace in the string.