TLF Blog » Shell Programming http://www.thelinuxfix.com/blog Updates from the trenches of The Linux Fix Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:41:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 en hourly 1 Adding a line to the beginning of a file in Unix/Linux http://www.thelinuxfix.com/blog/2009/11/05/adding-a-line-to-the-beginning-of-a-file-in-unixlinux/ http://www.thelinuxfix.com/blog/2009/11/05/adding-a-line-to-the-beginning-of-a-file-in-unixlinux/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:41:03 +0000 brian http://www.thelinuxfix.com/blog/?p=50 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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