Sed command inside a for loop with variables - bash

Question

I have a file named dates.txt which contains the following:
DATE_1
DATE_2
DATE_3
DATE_4
DATE_5
DATE_6
DATE_7
I just want to replace DATE_i with some dates that are stored in v array using sed command.
To do that I tried a for loop and a sed command (file test.sh):
#!/bin/bash
v[1]=`date -d "7 days ago" '+%d\/%m\/%y'`
v[2]=`date -d "6 days ago" '+%d\/%m\/%y'`
v[3]=`date -d "5 days ago" '+%d\/%m\/%y'`
v[4]=`date -d "4 days ago" '+%d\/%m\/%y'`
v[5]=`date -d "3 days ago" '+%d\/%m\/%y'`
v[6]=`date -d "2 days ago" '+%d\/%m\/%y'`
v[7]=`date -d "1 days ago" '+%d\/%m\/%y'`
cat dates.txt|for j in {1..7};do sed "s/DATE_$j/${v[$j]}/";done
The problem is that this command replaces only the first date. If you run test.sh:
$ ./test.sh
14/03/16
DATE_2
DATE_3
DATE_4
DATE_5
DATE_6
DATE_7
The output I am expecting is:
14/03/16
15/03/16
16/03/16
17/03/16
18/03/16
19/03/16
20/03/16
I cannot understand why this is not working.
Could anyone please explain why this is happening and propose a proper solution for this problem?
Thanks!!

Answer 1

Explanation: What's happening is that the first iteration of the for loop is consuming all of the lines you're piping to its standard input. First of all, let's modify test.sh to contain an echo statement in the last line so that we can see what's happening:
cat dates.txt|for j in {1..7};do echo $j; sed "s/DATE_$j/${v[$j]}/";done
You'll see the output from test.sh is the following:
1
13/03/16
DATE_2
DATE_3
DATE_4
DATE_5
DATE_6
DATE_7
2
3
4
5
6
7
Next, modify dates.txt to read:
DATE_1
DATE_2
DATE_1
DATE_4
DATE_1
DATE_6
DATE_1
, where we've turned every other line into DATE_1 for demonstration purposes. Now, the output reads:
1
13/03/16
DATE_2
13/03/16
DATE_4
13/03/16
DATE_6
13/03/16
2
3
4
5
6
7
So you see that the first iteration of the for loop (when $j == 1) is processing every line that cat is passing to the for loop. After that, the subsequent iterations of the for loop ($j == 2..7) still run, but they don't receive any input stream (so, in the above example, they just echo the current value of $j and don't pass any input to sed). That's why you were observing that it was changing only the first line.
Solution: Modify the last line to read:
for j in {1..7}; do head -$j dates.txt | tail -1 | sed "s/DATE_$j/${v[$j]}/"; done

Answer 2

cat dates.txt | sed 's/^DATE_//g'
This will strip DATE_ at the beginning of a line (^), leaving the number (or anything else on the line). No need for a loop at all!