Insert text before the first word in all the lines of a file

[Anand_30]

Hi,

I have a file and I want to insert a text say "abcd" before the first word in all the lines of the file without opening the file. For example, the input file is something like

1234 5678 90001
1111 1111 11111

The ouput file should be like

abcd 1234 5678 90001
abcd 1111 1111 11111


Can anyone please help me out in this.

Thanks,
Anand

[Biswajit Tripathy · Accepted solution]

$ cat input_file | sed 's/^/abcd /g' > outfile

- Biswajit

[Hein van den Heuvel]

A perl solution is of course realy tight also:

> cat > x
1234 5678 90001
1111 1111 11111
> perl -pe '$_="abcd $_"' x
abcd 1234 5678 90001
abcd 1111 1111 11111

Cheers,
Hein.

(0 points please :-)

[Mic V.]

Or in ex/vi:


:1,$s/^/abcd /


Mic

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Anand,

Open the file using vi.

do the following.

:%s/^/word to be inserted/g


regards,
Syam

[twang]

[root@iris ~]# cat sample
one 1
two 1 two 1
three 1
one 1
two 1
two 1
three 1
hello world
[root@iris ~]# sed 's/^/abcd /' sample
abcd one 1
abcd two 1 two 1
abcd three 1
abcd one 1
abcd two 1
abcd two 1
abcd three 1
abcd hello world

[Sundaram Ramasamy]

You can use perl inplace editing option

$ perl -i.old -pe 's/^/abcd /' a
$ cat a
abcd 1234 5678 90001
abcd 1111 1111 11111
$

[Bob Smith_23]

sed 's/^/abcd /' input_file > output_file