Bash - how to put each line within quotation

Question

I want to put each line within quotation marks, such as:

abcdefg
hijklmn
opqrst

convert to:

\"abcdefg\"
\"hijklmn\"
\"opqrs         


        

Answer 1

Use sed:

sed -e 's/^\|$/"/g' file

More effort needed if the file contains empty lines.

Answer 2

Using awk

awk '{ print "\""$0"\""}' inputfile

Using pure bash

while read FOO; do
   echo -e "\"$FOO\""
done < inputfile

where inputfile would be a file containing the lines without quotes.

If your file has empty lines, awk is definitely the way to go:

awk 'NF { print "\""$0"\""}' inputfile

NF tells awk to only execute the print command when the Number of Fields is more than zero (line is not empty).

Answer 3

I think the sed and awk are the best solution but if you want to use just shell here is small script for you.

#!/bin/bash

chr="\""
file="file.txt"
cp $file $file."_backup"
while read -r line
do
 echo "${chr}$line${chr}"
done <$file > newfile
mv newfile $file

Answer 4

This sed should work for ignoring empty lines as well:

sed -i.bak 's/^..*$/"&"/' inFile

or

sed 's/^.\{1,\}$/"&"/' inFile

Answer 5

I use the following command:

xargs -I{lin} echo \"{lin}\" < your_filename

The xargs take standard input (redirected from your file) and pass one line a time to {lin} placeholder, and then execute the command at next, in this case a echo with escaped double quotes.

You can use the -i option of xargs to omit the name of the placeholder, like this:

xargs -i echo \"{}\" < your_filename

In both cases, your IFS must be at default value or with '\n' at least.

Answer 6

I used sed with two expressions to replace start and end of line, since in my particular use case I wanted to place HTML tags around only lines that contained particular words.

So I searched for the lines containing words contained in the bla variable within the text file inputfile and replaced the beginnign with <P> and the end with </P> (well actually I did some longer HTML tagging in the real thing, but this will serve fine as example)

Similar to:

$ bla=foo
$ sed -e "/${bla}/s#^#<P>#" -e "/${bla}/s#\$#</P>#" inputfile
<P>foo</P>
bar
$