Re: [tlug] Adding text to the beginning of a file

[Dave M G <martin@example.com>]

Arwyn,

Thanks for responding.
> Sed is your friend:
> sed '1,/^#--/ d' < file_with_data_to_replace > tmp_file
> cat file_with_new_data tmp_file > end_result_file 

Thank you for the code and the link. I'm afraid that the tutorial left 
my head spinning a bit. I'm just learning bash shell syntax, and sed 
seems to have a whole new layer of options. I hope it's okay if I ask 
some more questions.

What I've learned is that this line in the above code:
cat file_with_new_data tmp_file > end_result_file

... wipes out the whole tmp_file with the contents of file_with_new_data.

If I change it to:
cat file_with_new_data tmp_file >> end_result_file

... then it adds the contents of file_with_new_data to the *end* of 
tmp_file. This is better, but actually, what I want to do is stick the 
data on at the beginning. Prepend, not append. I looked up command 
options for "cat" but couldn't find how to do it.

Other questions:

1. Can I use cat to prepend the contents of a variable in the shell 
script? I tried this:
TEXT="This is text"
cat $TEXT temp.file >> new.file

... but what it tried to do was look for three files called "This", 
"is", and "text" to append to the new file.

2. How do I execute this on multiple files? Like *.php,  and .class?

--
Dave M G
Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft
Kernel 2.6.20-5-generic
Pentium D Dual Core Processor
PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2