sed script to add >'s to quoted text

[4197,ATTT]

In article <Feb.23.10.31.33.1991.12538 at pilot.njin.net> dblack at pilot.njin.net (David Alan Black) writes:
>I am trying to devise a simple shell script to add ">" to the beginning of
>every line of a text file containing an article or letter which I wish to
>quote in my response.
>
>Can someone please explain why the following doesn't work (I'll reproduce
>the whole session):
>
>pilot% cat > quote
>sed s/^/\>/ -e $1 > $1.quoted
>^D
>pilot% chmod a+x quote
>pilot% quote friend.letter
>quote: />/: not found
>pilot% sed: Illegal or missing delimiter: s/
>
>                           Mrs. Emma Peel

Your problem is that the shell can see the \> which it takes as a
literal and redirection. Try this:

cat >quote <<EOD
sed -e "s/^/\\>/" $1 >$1.quoted
EOD
quote letter

Note "-e" is not a switch, it is a non-positional  command line
parameter.  An edit script must follow it.

Hope this helps.

Bob Rager

Ain't no place like ${HOME}.