CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellunix
TechVolcano
TechVolcano

Reputation: 231

Need to concatenate a string to each line of ls command output in unix

I am a beginer in Shell script. Below is my requirement in UNIX Korn Shell.

Example:

When we list files using ls command redirect to a file the file names will be stored as below.

$ ls FILE*>FLIST.TXT
$ cat FLIST.TXT
FILE1
FILE2
FILE3

But I need output as below with a prefixed constant string STR,:

$ cat FLIST.TXT
STR,FILE1
STR,FILE2
STR,FILE3

Please let me what should be the ls command to acheive this output.

Upvotes: 8

Views: 14828

Answers (2)

dinox0r
dinox0r

Reputation: 16039

The following should work:

ls FILE* | xargs -i echo "STR,{}" > FLIST.TXT

It takes every one of the file names filtered by ls and adds the "STR," prefix to it prior to the appending

Upvotes: 8

Trevor Hickey
Trevor Hickey

Reputation: 37816

You can't use ls alone to append data before each file. ls exists to list files.
You will need to use other tools along side ls.

You can append to the front of each line using the sed command: 

cat FLIST.TXT | sed 's/^/STR,/'

This will send the changes to stdout.

If you'd like to change the actual file, run sed in place: 

sed -i -e 's/^/STR,/' FLIST.TXT

To do the append before writing to the file, pipe ls into sed: 

ls FILE* | sed 's/^/STR,/' > FLIST.TXT

Upvotes: 13

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