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Accepted
Anwar
Asked: 2012-06-17 02:49:00 +0800 CST

How do I insert a line at the top of a text file using the command line?

  • 772

I want to insert text at the top of an already existing file. How can I achieve this. I tried echo and tee but was not successful.

I was trying to insert repo line at the top of sources.list file from terminal.

Note

I need an one line quick solution, because another answer's method was known to me already

apt

6 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It's actually quite easy with sed:

    • sed -i -e '1iHere is my new top line\' filename

    • 1i tells sed to insert the text that follows at line 1 of the file; don't forget the \ newline at the end so that the existing line 1 is moved to line 2.

    • 45

  2. In general editing in place with a script is tricky, but you can use echo and cat and then mv

    echo "fred" > fred.txt
cat fred.txt t.txt >new.t.txt
# now the file new.t.txt has a new line "fred" at the top of it
cat new.t.txt
# can now do the rename/move
mv new.t.txt t.txt

    However if you're playing with sources.list you need to add in some validation and bullet-proofing to detect errors etc because you really don't want to loose this. But that's a separate question :-)

    • 8 
  3. ./prepend.sh "myString" ./myfile.txt

    known that prepend is my custom shell:

    #!/bin/sh
#add Line at the top of File
# @author Abdennour TOUMI
if [ -e $2 ]; then
    sed -i -e '1i$1\' $2
fi

    Use also a relatif path or absolute path , it should work fine : 

    ./prepend.sh "my New Line at Top"  ../Documents/myfile.txt

    Update :

    if you want a permanent script for this , open nano /etc/bash.bashrc then add this function at the end of file: 

    function prepend(){
# @author Abdennour TOUMI
if [ -e $2 ]; then
    sed -i -e '1i$1\' $2
fi

}

    Reopen you terminal and enjoy : 

    prepend "another line at top" /path/to/my/file.txt
    • 6

  4. And why not use a genuine text editor for that? ed is the standard text editor.

    ed -s filename <<< $'1i\nFIRST LINE HERE\n.\nwq'

    Or, if you want the commands to be more readable:

    ed -s filename < <(printf '%s\n' 1i "FIRST LINE" . wq)
    • 1: go to firstline
    • i: insert mode
    • your stuff you want to insert...
    • .: stop inserting, go back to normal mode
    • wq: write and quit, thank you, good bye.
    • 5

  5. You can use Vim in Ex mode:

    ex -s -c '1i|hello world' -c -x sources.list

    1. 1 select 1st line

    2. i insert new line of text

    3. x save and close

    • 3

  6. There is always the awk option. Replace string variable with your contents. This is not an in-place change though. Personally, I tend to not make in-place changes. This is definitely a personal preference. Two things, -v signifies a variable in awk and variable n is used here to match a line number, effectively NR == 1. You could use this in any number of ways just by changing the value of n and s.

    string="My New first line"; awk -v n=1 -v s="$string" 'NR == n {print s} {print}'     file.source > file.target

    Example:

    % cat file.source                                                                                                                                      

First Line
Second Line
Third Line

% string="Updated First Line"; awk -v n=1 -v s="$string" 'NR == n {print s} {print}' file.source > file.target; cat ./file.target                      !698

Updated First Line
First Line
Second Line
Third Line
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