Sai Karthik

There are multiple ways to append/prepend text to files. I am demonstrating the methods which i regularly use.

First, Let’s check the contents of the file fruits.txt

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cat fruits.txt
mango
banana

Appending Text:

We could use the symbol >> to append text to a file

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# add the word grapes to fruits.txt
echo grapes >> fruits.txt

Now, Let’s check the contents again

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cat fruits.txt
mango
banana
grapes

You can observe that the grapes is added to the last line of the file.

Prepending Text:

This will add text to the beginning of the file

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# add the word grapes to beginning fruits.txt
echo -e "grapes\n$(cat fruits.txt)" > fruits.txt

Let’s see the output of the file

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cat fruits.txt
grapes
mango
banana

You can observe that the grapes is added to the first line of the file.