Differences between revisions 6 and 7
Revision 6 as of 2009-01-11 09:31:26
Size: 590
Editor: ppp089210047077
Comment: ed sucks
Revision 7 as of 2010-05-26 05:12:24
Size: 681
Editor: 99-190-22-125
Comment:
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 4: Line 4:

To do it in 2 commands with sed:
sed "1iTEXTTOPREPEND" filename > tmp
mv tmp filename

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 do it in 2 commands with sed: sed "1iTEXTTOPREPEND" filename > tmp mv tmp filename

To insert content at the beginning of a file, you can use an editor:

ex file << EOF
0a
header line 1
header line 2
.
w
EOF

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 file

or lots of other solutions.

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