Append line to /etc/hosts file with shell script

Question

I have a new Ubuntu 12.04 VPS. I am trying to write a setup script that completes an entire LAMP installation. Where I am having trouble is appending a line to the /etc/ho

Answer 1

I should point out that sed (the stream editor) is not actually intended for editing files, although it can be used to do that. (Standard sed doesn't have a built-in mechanism for writing to other than standard output.) A more appropriate tool would be ed.

The following ed script says "find the line containing the (admittedly sloppy) regular expression /127.0.0.1/ and append at the next line." (The lone period tells ed to stop appending.)

ed /etc/hosts <<-'EOF'
    /127.0.0.1/a
    192.241.xx.xx  venus.example.com
    .
    wq
EOF

That said, you can really just append this line to the end of your /etc/hosts file very trivially:

echo '192.241.xx.xx  venus.example.com' >> /etc/hosts