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