Different ways to prepend a line: (echo 'line to prepend';cat file)|sponge file sed -i '1iline to prepend' file # GNU sed -i '' $'1i\\\nline to prepend\n' file # BSD printf %s\\n 0a 'line to prepend' . w|ed -s file perl -pi -e 'print"line to prepend\n"if$.==1' file

For filter-branch, using pipelines like git ls-files | grep -v ... | xargs -r git rm might be a reasonable workaround but can get unwieldy and isn't as straightforward for users; plus those commands are often operating-system specific (can you spot the GNUism in the snippet I provided?)

I just wanted to point out that the syntax is not supported by the POSIX standard and thus won't universally work in /bin/sh scripts (many people erroneously use bash syntax in /bin/sh scripts)

does not use TCL, Perl, PHP, Python or anything else as an underlying language is written entirely in C has small and simple source code can easily be ported to almost all UNIX-like systems

you can use "${@:1}" instead of shift, but that requires bash instead of sh in your #! shebang. IMHO your original shift approach is simpler and better

Now this probably won't make difference in the real world (e.g. because the exit codes are not portable and on top of that not always unambiguous as discussed in Default exit code when process is terminated?)

In any case signal handling in shells is one of the least reliable and portable aspects. You'll find behaviours vary greatly between shells and often between different versions of a same shell. Be prepared for some serious hair pulling and head scratching if you're going to try to do anything non-trivial.