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up vote 6 down vote favorite

I input data into a csv by 'echo'-ing some values into another csv.

I tried echo "" and in the next line echo "values" but i get intermittent empty lines..

I need empty line only at the start....

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Please show small example code, input data and output data –  grebneke 12 hours ago
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2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote

There are many ways of doing this. Since you have not explained your issue with any detail, I am assuming that you are doing something like this:

values=$(grep foo csv1.csv)
echo "$values" > csv2.csv

At any rate, you seem to be extracting some lines of one csv file and inserting them into another. To add an empty line to the beginning of the new csv file, you do any of these:

echo  > csv2.csv; grep foo csv1.csv >> csv2.csv

Or, if you have already created csv2.csv:

awk 'NR==1{print ""} {print}' csv2.csv > tmpfile && mv tmpfile csv2.csv

or

perl -i -lpe 'print "" if $.==1' csv2.csv

or

sed -i '1 x;p;x;' csv2.csv
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up vote 4 down vote

Use sed as follows to insert a blank line in the beginning of a file x.txt:

 sed '1 i \
 ' x.txt
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