How do I prepend a text to a file (the opposite of >>)?
You cannot do it with bash redirections alone; the opposite of >> does not exist....
To insert content at the beginning of a file, you can use an editor, for example ex:
ex file << EOF 0a header line 1 header line 2 . w EOF
or ed:
printf '%s\n' 0a "line 1" "line 2" . w | ed -s file
ex will also add a newline character to the end of the file if it's missing.
Or you can rewrite the file, using things like:
{ echo line; cat file ;} >tmpfile && mv tmpfile file
echo line | cat - file > tmpfile && mv tmpfile fileSome people insist on using the sed hammer to pound in all the screws:
sed "1iTEXTTOPREPEND" filename > tmp && mv tmp filename
There are lots of other solutions as well.