Re: [SLUG] Re: Insert text at the beginning of a file
Dan Treacy wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ouch a problem begging for perl as a solution! James Probably, but seeing as though my shell skills are half a step above totally crap and my perl skills are 4 steps below shell it is :-) And thanks everyone for your suggestions I haven't had a chance to test any of them out. maybe tonight. Dan. If you're talking about inserting text at the beginning of a file, than perl has a tidy way of doing it all for you: $ perl -pi -e "s/^/foobar\n/ if ($.==1);" test.file That's pretty easy! See the 'perlrun' manpage. Doesn't seem to work if test.file is empty ie 0 lines. Nice variation where you can say '-i.orig' and you will have the original stored with a '.orig' extension, or whatever you want. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Re: Insert text at the beginning of a file
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ouch a problem begging for perl as a solution! James Probably, but seeing as though my shell skills are half a step above totally crap and my perl skills are 4 steps below shell it is :-) And thanks everyone for your suggestions I haven't had a chance to test any of them out. maybe tonight. Dan. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Re: Insert text at the beginning of a file
Ouch a problem begging for perl as a solution! James > On Wed, 2004-12-15 at 03:01 +1100, Dan Treacy wrote: > > I have a text file that I'm trying to update from a shell script but the > > information needs to be inserted at the beginning of the file. > > > > I have a couple of ways to do this that involves lots of "cat"ing and > > mving and temporary files and the like etc. Not real high on the > > efficiency scale. > > By the time you muck around it is far easier to do something like this: > > echo SOMETEXT >newfile$$ > echo "some more text and $VARIABLE" >> newfile$$ > cat oldfile >> newfile$$ > mv oldfile oldfile.bak > mv newfile$$ oldfile > > If you consider what is happening with the filesystem anyway either you > do it or the OS does it so the result is the same. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
