Add a header to a tab delimited file

Question

I\'d like to add a header to a tab-delimited file but I am not sure how to do it in one line in linux.

Let us say my file is:

Answer 1

Using sed no need of temp file

sed -i "s#^#name\tage\tuniversity\tcity#g#"

Demo:

$ cat file1.txt
roger\t18\tcolumbia\tnew york\n
albert\t21\tdartmouth\tnew london\n
etc...
$ sed -i "s#^#name\tage\tuniversity\tcity#g#" file1.txt $ cat file1.txt
name    age     university      cityroger\t18\tcolumbia\tnew york\n
name    age     university      cityalbert\t21\tdartmouth\tnew london\n
name    age     university      cityetc...
$

Answer 2

perl -i -lne 'if($.==1){print "newline\n$_"}else{print}' your_file

Answer 3

First create a file with the header content:

$ cat >header
name^Iage^Iuniversity^Icity (return)
^D

(where ^I is the tab key)

Then prepend it to the data

$ cat header myfile >newfile
$ mv newfile myfile

Answer 4

cat <(head -1 theFileWithHeader) theFileWithoutHeader > newfile;
mv newfile theFileWithoutHeader;

Answer 5

$ { printf 'name\tage\tuniversity\tcity\n'; cat orig-file; } > new-file

Or

$ printf '1\ni\nname\tage\tuniversity\tcity\n.\nw\n' | ed -s orig-file

Answer 6

There isn't a "prepend" operator like the "append" operator >>, but you can write the header to a temp-file, copy your file's contents into the temp-file after that, and move it back:

echo -e "name\tage\tuniversity\tcity" | cat - yourfile > /tmp/out && mv /tmp/out yourfile