Backquote interpolation is performed by the shell, not by sed
. This means that your backquotes will either be replaced by the output of a command before the sed command is run, or (if you correctly quote them) they will not be replaced at all, and sed
will see the backquotes.
You appear to be trying to have sed perform a replacement, then have the shell perform backquote interpolation.
You can get the backquotes past the shell by quoting them properly:
$ echo "" | sed -e 's/^/`hostname`/'
`hostname`
However, in that case you will have to use the resulting string in a shell command line to cause backquote interpolation again.
Depending on how you feel about awk, perl, or python, I'd suggest you use one of them to do this job in a single pass. Alternatively, you could make a first pass extracting the hostnames into a command without backquotes, then execute the commands to get the IP addresses you want, then replace them in another pass.