Use OS X's sed in a script to find a string and append a line beneath it including a newline character

Question

I've learned that the BSD version of sed included with OS X doesn't provide an intuitive way to add newlines. I've found a few notes about it, but I don't understand yet, how to extend the examples to solve my problem.

I need to append several lines to a file and found that the lines I add do not include newline characters.

My shell script currently contains the following:

sed '/match string/  a\
newline string' ./inputfile > ./outputfile

And, I'm trying to apply the tip I found here Newlines in sed on Mac OS X

Answer 1

Nevermind. While reformatting the code portion of this question, a solution became clear:

I found that the following does exactly what I need:

sed '/match string/  a\
newline string \
' ./inputfile > ./outputfile