The 0a means append after the 0th line (i.e. $ cat file.txt This is line1 This is line2 This is line3 This is line5 This is line8. In the following script, an existing file, books.txt is assigned to the variable, filename, and a string value will be taken as input from the user to add at the end of the file. sed -i '23iabcd' file.conf inserts at line 23 the text abcd into file file.conf-i does the modification directly to file file.conf.. A new file is created by the first command, and text is inserted into it. To append the string “hello” to file greetings.txt echo "hello" >> greetings.txt; To append the contents of the file temp.txt to file data.txt cat temp.txt >> data.txt; To append the current date/time timestamp to the file dates.txt date >> dates.txt; Take it one step further – Find out how to insert a string to the beginning of a file The x causes Ex to save the changes to the file and exit. Let’s have a look at the command below: cat >> [file_name] on a line by itself terminates the "append" command. "echo." Adding words and sentences to a config file from open terminal can be easily achieved with sed. A solution significantly faster than this is not possible, because Unix filesystem semantics don't support prepending to a file, only appending. You can, of course, add lines one by one: $ echo "line 1" >> result.txt $ echo "line 2" >> result.txt Next variant is to enter new line in terminal: echo "line 1 line 2 line 3" >> result.txt ren file.txt temp.txt echo.new first line>file.txt type temp.txt >>file.txt del temp.txt Note the structure of the echo. If you want to use awk then:. There are several ways to append multiple lines to a file at once. but I just get the printout (similar to terminal echo) of the text I am trying to grab. awk -v n=23 -v s="abcd" 'NR == n {print s} {print}' file > file.conf Add character at the beginning of each line using sed command. To do so, run: $ nl file.txt 1 This is line1 2 This is line2 3 This is line3 4 This is line5 5 This is line8. 0. The “>>” operator is used to append text to the end of a file that already has content. The next line or multiple lines is literal text to be added. The second command adds a line of text to the bottom of the file. The cat command displays the contents of the file to the terminal window. To add the string to the beginning of a file, the format would be this: echo "50 $( cat file.txt )" > file.txt If you get a cannot overwrite existing file … And of course, we can include variables to add some useful information to our file. ... How to search or append a word in text file using gedit and terminal commands only. (echo "Foobar"; cat file.txt) >tmpfile cp tmpfile file.txt rm tmpfile If it doesn't matter that file.txt's inode changes, replace the "cp" by "mv". Example-1: Append line to the file using ‘echo’ command and ‘>>’ symbol. before the first line). The nl command won't take empty lines into account. linux.txt as shown above. There's plenty of methods of appending to file without opening text editors, particularly via multiple available text processing utilities in Ubuntu. It's not hard when you break it down into two steps. allows you to put spaces at the beginning of the line if necessary and abutting the ">" redirection character ensures there's no trailing spaces (unless you want them, of course). Append multiple lines to a file. Let us add the line numbers. If the input value is not empty, then the ‘echo’ command will append the value into the books.txt file by using ‘>>’ symbol. Consider we want to append text to the end of a file i.e. Ultimately I want to loop over several 'proto' files in multiple directories and copy the text between the "BEGINHMM", "ENDHMM" block in each directory, and append the selected text to that directory's monophones.txt lines. 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