How to insert a text at the beginning of a file?

Question

So far I've been able to find how to add a line at the beginning of a file but that's not exactly what I want. I'll show it on a example

File content

some text at the beginning

Result

<added text> some text at the beginning

It's similar but I don't want to create any new line with it...

I would like to do this with sed if possible.

Answer 1

There is a very easy way:

echo "your header" > headerFile.txt
cat yourFile >> headerFile.txt

Answer 2

echo -n "text to insert " ;tac filename.txt| tac > newfilename.txt

The first tac pipes the file backwards (last line first) so the "text to insert" appears last. The 2nd tac wraps it once again so the inserted line is at the beginning and the original file is in its original order.

Answer 3

If you want to add a line at the beginning of a file, you need to add \n at the end of the string in the best solution above.

The best solution will add the string, but with the string, it will not add a line at the end of a file.

sed -i '1s/^/your text\n/' file

Answer 4

my two cents:

sed  -i '1i /path/of/file.sh' filename

This will work even is the string containing forward slash "/"

Answer 5

Note that on OS X, sed -i <pattern> file, fails. However, if you provide a backup extension, sed -i old <pattern> file, then file is modified in place while file.old is created. You can then delete file.old in your script.

Answer 6

To add a line to the top of the file:

sed -i '1iText to add\'