TLF Blog » Shell Programming http://thelinuxfix.com/blog Hosting, Unix, and everything in between. Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:34:12 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Adding a line to the beginning of a file in Unix/Linux http://thelinuxfix.com/blog/2009/05/11/adding-a-line-to-the-beginning-of-a-file-in-unixlinux/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=adding-a-line-to-the-beginning-of-a-file-in-unixlinux http://thelinuxfix.com/blog/2009/05/11/adding-a-line-to-the-beginning-of-a-file-in-unixlinux/#comments Mon, 11 May 2009 20:38:46 +0000 Greg http://thelinuxfix.com/blog/?p=118 This morning someone asked me how to do a relatively simple operation from a Unix shell: Adding a line of text to the beginning of a file.

Much to my surprise he asked for help with amazingly complex methods he had tried.

Okay everyone, no need to hit this thumbtack with a sledgehammer!  Let’s say you have a file “textfile.txt” and want to put “<Header>” on the top:

echo -e “<Header>\n$(cat textfile.txt)” > textfile.txt

There you go, nice and simple.

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