I'm trying to insert into a text file the string cd $var at the second line using sed, but it doesn't seem to work. I'm using the syntax for inserting a line at a specific line in a file,
sed -i '2icd $var' FILE
The format of which was found as the response to this question:
Insert a line at specific line number with sed or awk
My best guess is that sed is interpreting the command literally and evaluating it instead of copying it in. However, all of my attempts at forcing it to be evaluated simply as a string have failed. My attempts so far:
sed -i '2i\cd $var' FILE
sed -i '2i\cd \$var' FILE
sed -i "2i'cd $var'" FILE
and
Line='cd $var'
sed -i "2i$Line" FILE
I was fairly sure this last attempt would succeed, due to the hard quotes, but it still failed.
In fact, this also failed,
sed -i '2icd' FILE
Yet this succeeded (Just to confirm the general format):
sed -i '2ic' FILE
Just to be clear, all 5 of the failed attempts yielded the same error: A blank line was inserted at the desired location.
