Perl: add character to begin of a line

Question

I want to add a " character to the begin of every line in a text file. Is there any simple solution?

If perl is not mandatory I would suggest using sed: sed -i 's/^/"/' file — hmontoliu
– hmontoliu, Commented Jul 27, 2011 at 16:14

Aif · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-27 15:57:41Z

6

perl -p -e 's/^/"/' myfile should do it!

$ cat myfile 
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
$ perl -p -e 's/^/"/' myfile
"0
"1
"2
"3
"4
"5
"6
"7
"8
"9
"10

answered Jul 27, 2011 at 15:57

Aif

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3 Comments

Quentin Over a year ago

Or perl -pe '$_ = qq{"$_}' myfile

Adrian Over a year ago

Thanks, the /^/ indicate the begin of a line?

Aif Over a year ago

@Adrian: yes, ^ is the beginning of line, and $ then end.

glenn jackman · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-27 17:37:53Z

2

Another couple of suggestions:

just in the shell:

tmp=$(mktemp)
while read -r line; do printf '"%s\n' "$line"; done < filename > "$tmp" &&
mv "$tmp" filename

ed:

ed describes.sql.bak <<'END'
1,$s/^/"/
w
q
END

answered Jul 27, 2011 at 17:37

glenn jackman

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Comments

TLP · Accepted Answer · 2011-07-27 16:04:12Z

1

I would consider one of these ways:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/^/"/' inputfile.txt

Edit file in place, saves a backup in "inputfile.txt.bak".

perl -pe 's/^/"/' inputfile.txt > outputfile.txt

Use shell redirection to print the output to a new file.

answered Jul 27, 2011 at 16:04

TLP

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