Modify some files to add the file name

Question

I have a bunch of text (hundreds of txt) inside a directory. Each of them has a unique filename. I want to insert filename of each file into the first line of respective files. How can I do that using bash script?

Answer 1

Standard approach is to use temporary files, but you can change files in place if you enclose cat in $() parenthesis:

for file in *.txt; do echo "$file"$'\n'"$(cat -- "$file")" > "$file"; done

Answer 2

You could use the standard text editor:

for f in *; do printf '%s\n' 1i "$f" . w q | ed "$f"; done

Answer 3

for file in *; do
 (echo "$file"; cat -- "$file") > "$file.new"
 mv -- "$file.new" "$file"
done

This loops over all files echoes each filename and appends the contents of the file then all placing it into a new file with the additional suffix of .new.

You create a new file for each existing one, so you must rename the files afterwards.

You can place the results into a new directory and then remove the old one:

mkdir new
for file in *; do
 (echo "$file"; cat "$file") > "new/$file"
done

You can also use sed with option -i to do in-place editing of the files. Perl also allows this. It all depends on what other tools you have available. :)