writing text to the beginning of a file

linuxmandrake · 03-26-2006, 11:55 AM

I have these files which have random stuff in them but I want all of them to have "steven" as their very first line. How can I do that to all files with a .txt extension

btmiller · 03-26-2006, 12:01 PM

Linux and Unix systems do not use file extensions the way Windows does -- they don't matter.The following willwork on all text files (though I use *.txt as a fileglob to apply the file operation to all files ending in .txt, but you could use any other expression). The actual command is:

sed -i.bak -e 'i steven\' *.txt

All of the files will be backed up (with a .bak extension added) before they are edited in case something goes wrong. I'd suggest reading up on sed to understand how what I did works.

linuxmandrake · 03-26-2006, 01:09 PM

it doesn't work

original file
a
b
c
d

after executing command
steven
a
steven
b
steven
c
steven
d

what i want is
steven
a
b
c
d

btmiller · 03-26-2006, 10:55 PM

Oops, I forgot the line specifier, correct command is:

sed -i.bak -e '1 i steven\' *.txt

The leading 1 tells sed to perform the operation only on the first line of the file.