Unix command to prepend text to a file
command-line, prepend, unix, utilities
Solution
sed -i.old '1s;^;to be prepended;' inFile
- `-i` writes the change in place and take a backup if any extension is given. (In this case, `.old`)
- `1s;^;to be prepended;` substitutes the beginning of the first line by the given replacement string. `1` means act on the first line, `s` means replace, `;` is the delimiter we've selected for `s` (`/` is a common choice as in `s///` but any character can be used) and `^` is the regular expression that matches the beginning of a line
If you want to add a new line to the beginning of the file, you need to add `\n` on the replacement as in:
sed -i.old '1s;^;to be prepended\n;' inFile
Problem
Is there a Unix command to prepend some string data to a text file? Something like: ``` prepend "to be prepended" text.txt ```