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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I want to write 8 lines from file1 at the beginning of file2.

My file1 contains the following lines:

$BQ  
{ VOL       @home    }  
database    daba  
relation    tcdeatid  
copy           1  
{ version        0 }  
opendb  
clear
# other stuff

My file2 contains the following lines:

.lruno := 72  
.infno := 1    
writedb     
clear

My output file will be:

$BQ  
{ VOL       @home    }  
database    daba  
relation    tcdeatid  
copy           1  
{ version        0 }  
opendb  
clear  
.lruno := 72  
.infno := 1    
writedb       
clear
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4 Answers 4

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You can do it with standard tools.

With paste:

paste -sd'\n' file1 file2

With sed:

sed p file1 file2
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up vote 2 down vote 
cat file1 file2 > output_file

Cat is short for concatenate which is what you are trying to do. If you want to keep the results in file1, you could just add them to the end:

cat file2 >> file1

Notice that in the first case output_file will be truncated (using >). Using a double will append (>>)

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up vote 2 down vote

Something like:

head -n8 file1 | cat - file2 > file2."$$" && mv file2."$$" file2
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up vote 1 down vote

With ed

ed file2 <<END
0r file1
w
q
END

at line "0", read in the file "file1", save and exit

As a one-liner: printf "%s\n" "0r file1" w q | ed file2

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