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Please note that this will not work if the file is empty. ed will also add a newline character to the end of the file if it's missing.

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:

ed -s file << EOF
1i
header line 1
header line 2
.
w
EOF

Please note that this will not work if the file is empty. ed 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 file

or lots of other solutions.

BashFAQ/090 (last edited 2017-02-14 19:48:12 by GreyCat)