The simplest method to use variables in a sed command is to enclose your sed command in double quotes ( ") instead of single quotes ( '). Because the shell performs variable substitution on double-quoted strings, the shell will substitute the value of any variables you specify before sed executes.
For example, the command
sed "/$DEL/d" file1 > file2
deletes all the lines in file1 that contain the value stored in the variable $DEL.
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