Bash awk append to same line - bash

Question

There are numerous posts about removing leading white space and appending an entry to a single existing line in a file using awk. None of my attempts work - just three examples here of the many I have tried.
Say I have a file called $log with a single line
a:b:c
and I want to add a fourth entry,
awk '{ print $4"d" }' $log | tee -a $log
output seems to be a newline
`a:b:c:
d`
whereas, I want all on the same line;
a:b:c:d
try
BEGIN { FS = ":" } ; awk '{ print $4"d" }' $log | tee -a $log
or, this - avoid a new line
awk 'BEGIN { ORS=":" }; { print $4"d" }' $log | tee -a $log
no change
`a:b:c:
d`
awk is placing a space after c: and then writing d to the next line.
EDIT: | tee -a $log appears to be necessary to write the additional string to the file.
$log contains 39 variables and was generated using awk without | tee -a
odd...
The actual command to write $40 to the single line entries
awk '{ print $40"'$imagedir'" }' $log
output
+ awk '{ print $40"/home/geoland/Asterism-DEVEL/DSO" }'
/home/geoland/.asterism/log
but this does not write to the $log file.
How should I append d to the same line without leading white space using awk - also looking at sed xargs and other alternatives.

Answer 1

Using awk:
awk '{ print $0":d" }' file
Using sed:
sed 's/$/:d/' file
Using only bash:
while IFS= read -r line; do
echo "$line:d"
done < file

Answer 2

Using sed:
$ echo a:b:c | sed 's,\(^.*$\),\1:d,'
a:b:c:d

Answer 3

Thanks all... This is the solution I went with. I also needed to write the entire line to a perpetual log file because the log file is overwritten at each new process instance.
I will further investigate an awk solution.
logname=$imagedir/log_$name
while IFS=: read -r line; do
echo "$line$imagedir"
done < $log | tee $logname
This places $imagedir directly behind the last IFS ':' separator
There is probably room for refinement.

Answer 4

I too am not entirely sure what you're trying to do here.
Your command line, awk '{ print $4"d" }' $log | tee -a $log is problematic in a number of ways.
First, your awk script tries to print the 4th field, which is empty. Unless you say otherwise, fields are separated by whitespace, and the string a:b:c has no whitespace. So .. awk prints "d". And tee -a appends to your existing logfile, so what you're seeing is the original data, along with the d printed by awk. That's totally expected.
Second, it appears to have tee appending to the same file that awk is in the process of reading. This won't make an endless loop, as awk should stop reading the input file after whatever was the last byte when the file was opened, but it does mean you may have repeated data there.
Your other attempts, aside from some syntactical errors, all suffer from the same assumption that $4 means something that it does not.
The following awk snippet sets the input and output field separators to :, then sets the 4th field to "d", then prints the line.
$ echo "a:b:c" | awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=":"} {$4="d"} 1'
a:b:c:d
Is that what you want?
If you really do need to append this data to an existing log file, you can do so with tee -a or simple >> redirection. Just bear in mind that awk will only see the content of the file as of the time it was run, and by appending, you are not replacing lines.
One other thing. If you are actually hoping to use the content of the shell variable $imagedir inside awk, you should pass the variable in rather than exiting your quotes. For example:
$ echo "a:b:c" | awk -v d="foo/bar" 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=":"} {$4=d} 1'
a:b:c:foo/bar

Answer 5

sed "s|$|$imagedir|" file | tee newfile
This does the trick. Read 'file' and write the contents of 'file' with the substitution to a 'new file', so as to read the image directory when using a secondary standalone process.
Because the variable is a directory with several / these need to be escaped, so as not to interpret as sed delimiters. I had difficulty with this using a variable.
A neater option was to use an alternative delimiter. Not to be confused with the pipe that follows.