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Imagine that you have to create many lines in file all with the same text except for one variable:

foo text $variable bar text
foo text $variable bar text
foo text $variable bar text
...

I was wondering if this could be made using a bash script passing it the variable as an argument:

./my_script '1'
./my_script '2'
./my_script '3'

Which would generate this:

foo text 1 bar text
foo text 2 bar text
foo text 3 bar text

Any suggestions or examples on how to do this?

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1  
It seems to me that there might be a better way to express in code what you are trying to accomplish. It seems a lot of work to type N lines of calls to a script just to create N lines of text. If that's all you want to do, your my_script can just do something like cat >>output.file "foo text $1 bar text". Or can you better describe what you may really want(?) – Art Swri Mar 2 '12 at 18:12
    
Could this be a possible solution? for i in {1..3}; do echo foo text $i bar text; done – Gandaro Mar 2 '12 at 18:31
up vote 1 down vote accepted

See also http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internalvariables.html#POSPARAMREF:

#!/bin/bash

echo "foo text ${1} bar text"
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The {} isn't needed. – jordanm Mar 2 '12 at 18:47
    
There's nothing wrong with a little extra clarity. – Sorpigal Mar 2 '12 at 19:10
    
@jordanm You are right. It is not necessary. But I try to accustom myself to use ${VARIABLENAME} always. IMHO it improves readability and prevent hard-to-find errors. – sgibb Mar 2 '12 at 19:14
up vote 1 down vote

It's too trivial a task to write a script for.

Here are a couple of possible solutions:

for (( variable=1; variable<10; ++variable )); do
  echo foo text $variable bar text
done

or...

for name in Dave Susan Peter Paul; do
  echo "Did you know that $name is coming to my party?"
done
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up vote 1 down vote

This might work for you:

printf "foo text %d bar text\n" {1..10}
foo text 1 bar text
foo text 2 bar text
foo text 3 bar text
foo text 4 bar text
foo text 5 bar text
foo text 6 bar text
foo text 7 bar text
foo text 8 bar text
foo text 9 bar text
foo text 10 bar text

or this:

printf "foo text %s bar text\n" foo bar baz
foo text foo bar text
foo text bar bar text
foo text baz bar text
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up vote 0 down vote

This will depend on how you are getting "foo text" and "bar text". If it is set statically:

var="foo text $1 bar text"
echo "$var"

Or if it is in separate variables you can concatenate them:

foo="foo text"
bar="bar text"
output="$foo $1 $bar"
echo "$output"
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up vote 0 down vote

Assuming you're stuck with that crappy template file: 

perl -pe 'BEGIN {$count=0} s/\$variable/ ++$count /ge' file
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