How can I add a string to the beginning of each file in a folder in bash?

Question

I want to be able to prepend a string to the beginning of each text file in a folder. How can I do this using bash on Linux?

Answer 1

This should do the trick.

FOLDER='path/to/your/folder'
TEXT='Text to prepend'
cd $FOLDER
for i in `ls -1 $FOLDER`; do
     CONTENTS=`cat $i`
     echo $TEXT > $i  # use echo -n if you want the append to be on the same line
     echo $CONTENTS >> $i
done

I wouldn't recommending doing this if your files are very big though.