Related
Is there a Unix command to prepend some string data to a text file?
Something like:
prepend "to be prepended" text.txt
printf '%s\n%s\n' "to be prepended" "$(cat text.txt)" >text.txt
sed -i.old '1s;^;to be prepended;' inFile
-i writes the change in place and take a backup if any extension is given. (In this case, .old)
1s;^;to be prepended; substitutes the beginning of the first line by the given replacement string, using ; as a command delimiter.
Process Substitution
I'm surprised no one mentioned this.
cat <(echo "before") text.txt > newfile.txt
which is arguably more natural than the accepted answer (printing something and piping it into a substitution command is lexicographically counter-intuitive).
...and hijacking what ryan said above, with sponge you don't need a temporary file:
sudo apt-get install moreutils
<<(echo "to be prepended") < text.txt | sponge text.txt
EDIT: Looks like this doesn't work in Bourne Shell /bin/sh
Here String (zsh only)
Using a here-string - <<<, you can do:
<<< "to be prepended" < text.txt | sponge text.txt
This is one possibility:
(echo "to be prepended"; cat text.txt) > newfile.txt
you'll probably not easily get around an intermediate file.
Alternatives (can be cumbersome with shell escaping):
sed -i '0,/^/s//to be prepended/' text.txt
If it's acceptable to replace the input file:
Note:
Doing so may have unexpected side effects, notably potentially replacing a symlink with a regular file, ending up with different permissions on the file, and changing the file's creation (birth) date.
sed -i, as in Prince John Wesley's answer, tries to at least restore the original permissions, but the other limitations apply as well.
Here's a simple alternative that uses a temporary file (it avoids reading the whole input file into memory the way that shime's solution does):
{ printf 'to be prepended'; cat text.txt; } > tmp.txt && mv tmp.txt text.txt
Using a group command ({ ...; ...; }) is slightly more efficient than using a subshell ((...; ...)), as in 0xC0000022L's solution.
The advantages are:
It's easy to control whether the new text should be directly prepended to the first line or whether it should be inserted as new line(s) (simply append \n to the printf argument).
Unlike the sed solution, it works if the input file is empty (0 bytes).
The sed solution can be simplified if the intent is to prepend one or more whole lines to the existing content (assuming the input file is non-empty):
sed's i function inserts whole lines:
With GNU sed:
# Prepends 'to be prepended' *followed by a newline*, i.e. inserts a new line.
# To prepend multiple lines, use '\n' as part of the text.
# -i.old creates a backup of the input file with extension '.old'
sed -i.old '1 i\to be prepended' inFile
A portable variant that also works with macOS / BSD sed:
# Prepends 'to be prepended' *followed by a newline*
# To prepend multiple lines, escape the ends of intermediate
# lines with '\'
sed -i.old -e '1 i\
to be prepended' inFile
Note that the literal newline after the \ is required.
If the input file must be edited in place (preserving its inode with all its attributes):
Using the venerable ed POSIX utility:
Note:
ed invariably reads the input file as a whole into memory first.
To prepend directly to the first line (as with sed, this won't work if the input file is completely empty (0 bytes)):
ed -s text.txt <<EOF
1 s/^/to be prepended/
w
EOF
-s suppressed ed's status messages.
Note how the commands are provided to ed as a multi-line here-document (<<EOF\n...\nEOF), i.e., via stdin; by default string expansion is performed in such documents (shell variables are interpolated); quote the opening delimiter to suppress that (e.g., <<'EOF').
1 makes the 1st line the current line
function s performs a regex-based string substitution on the current line, as in sed; you may include literal newlines in the substitution text, but they must be \-escaped.
w writes the result back to the input file (for testing, replace w with ,p to only print the result, without modifying the input file).
To prepend one or more whole lines:
As with sed, the i function invariably adds a trailing newline to the text to be inserted.
ed -s text.txt <<EOF
0 i
line 1
line 2
.
w
EOF
0 i makes 0 (the beginning of the file) the current line and starts insert mode (i); note that line numbers are otherwise 1-based.
The following lines are the text to insert before the current line, terminated with . on its own line.
This will work to form the output. The - means standard input, which is provide via the pipe from echo.
echo -e "to be prepended \n another line" | cat - text.txt
To rewrite the file a temporary file is required as cannot pipe back into the input file.
echo "to be prepended" | cat - text.txt > text.txt.tmp
mv text.txt.tmp text.txt
Prefer Adam's answer
We can make it easier to use sponge. Now we don't need to create a temporary file and rename it by
echo -e "to be prepended \n another line" | cat - text.txt | sponge text.txt
Probably nothing built-in, but you could write your own pretty easily, like this:
#!/bin/bash
echo -n "$1" > /tmp/tmpfile.$$
cat "$2" >> /tmp/tmpfile.$$
mv /tmp/tmpfile.$$ "$2"
Something like that at least...
Editor's note:
This command will result in data loss if the input file happens to be larger than your system's pipeline buffer size, which is typically 64 KB nowadays. See the comments for details.
In some circumstances prepended text may available only from stdin.
Then this combination shall work.
echo "to be prepended" | cat - text.txt | tee text.txt
If you want to omit tee output, then append > /dev/null.
Another way using sed:
sed -i.old '1 {i to be prepended
}' inFile
If the line to be prepended is multiline:
sed -i.old '1 {i\
to be prepended\
multiline
}' inFile
Solution:
printf '%s\n%s' 'text to prepend' "$(cat file.txt)" > file.txt
Note that this is safe on all kind of inputs, because there are no expansions. For example, if you want to prepend !##$%^&*()ugly text\n\t\n, it will just work:
printf '%s\n%s' '!##$%^&*()ugly text\n\t\n' "$(cat file.txt)" > file.txt
The last part left for consideration is whitespace removal at end of file during command substitution "$(cat file.txt)". All work-arounds for this are relatively complex. If you want to preserve newlines at end of file.txt, see this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22607352/1091436
As tested in Bash (in Ubuntu), if starting with a test file via;
echo "Original Line" > test_file.txt
you can execute;
echo "$(echo "New Line"; cat test_file.txt)" > test_file.txt
or, if the version of bash is too old for $(), you can use backticks;
echo "`echo "New Line"; cat test_file.txt`" > test_file.txt
and receive the following contents of "test_file.txt";
New Line
Original Line
No intermediary file, just bash/echo.
Another fairly straight forward solution is:
$ echo -e "string\n" $(cat file)
% echo blaha > blaha
% echo fizz > fizz
% cat blaha fizz > buzz
% cat buzz
blaha
fizz
You can do that easily with awk
cat text.txt|awk '{print "to be prepended"$0}'
It seems like the question is about prepending a string to the file not each line of the file, in this case as suggested by Tom Ekberg the following command should be used instead.
awk 'BEGIN{print "to be prepended"} {print $0}' text.txt
If you like vi/vim, this may be more your style.
printf '0i\n%s\n.\nwq\n' prepend-text | ed file
For future readers who want to append one or more lines of text (with variables or even subshell code) and keep it readable and formatted, you may enjoy this:
echo "Lonely string" > my-file.txt
Then run
cat <<EOF > my-file.txt
Hello, there!
$(cat my-file.txt)
EOF
Results of cat my-file.txt:
Hello, there!
Lonely string
This works because the read of my-file.txt happens first and in a subshell. I use this trick all the time to append important rules to config files in Docker containers rather than copy over entire config files.
you can use variables
Even though a bunsh of answers here work pretty well, I want to contribute this one-liner, just for completeness. At least it is easy to keep in mind and maybe contributes to some general understanding of bash for some people.
PREPEND="new line 1"; FILE="text.txt"; printf "${PREPEND}\n`cat $FILE`" > $FILE
In this snippe just replace text.txt with the textfile you want to prepend to and new line 1 with the text to prepend.
example
$ printf "old line 1\nold line 2" > text.txt
$ cat text.txt; echo ""
old line 1
old line 2
$ PREPEND="new line 1"; FILE="text.txt"; printf "${PREPEND}\n`cat $FILE`" > $FILE
$ cat text.txt; echo ""
new line 1
old line 1
old line 2
$
# create a file with content..
echo foo > /tmp/foo
# prepend a line containing "jim" to the file
sed -i "1s/^/jim\n/" /tmp/foo
# verify the content of the file has the new line prepened to it
cat /tmp/foo
I'd recommend defining a function and then importing and using that where needed.
prepend_to_file() {
file=$1
text=$2
if ! [[ -f $file ]] then
touch $file
fi
echo "$text" | cat - $file > $file.new
mv -f $file.new $file
}
Then use it like so:
prepend_to_file test.txt "This is first"
prepend_to_file test.txt "This is second"
Your file contents will then be:
This is second
This is first
I'm about to use this approach for implementing a change log updater.
With ex,
ex - $file << PREPEND
-1
i
prepended text
.
wq
PREPEND
The ex commands are
-1 Go to the very beginning of the file
i Begin insert mode
. End insert mode
wq Save (write) and quit
I would like to generate a random filename in unix shell (say tcshell). The filename should consist of random 32 hex letters, e.g.:
c7fdfc8f409c548a10a0a89a791417c5
(to which I will add whatever is neccesary). The point is being able to do it only in shell without resorting to a program.
Assuming you are on a linux, the following should work:
cat /dev/urandom | tr -cd 'a-f0-9' | head -c 32
This is only pseudo-random if your system runs low on entropy, but is (on linux) guaranteed to terminate. If you require genuinely random data, cat /dev/random instead of /dev/urandom. This change will make your code block until enough entropy is available to produce truly random output, so it might slow down your code. For most uses, the output of /dev/urandom is sufficiently random.
If you on OS X or another BSD, you need to modify it to the following:
cat /dev/urandom | env LC_CTYPE=C tr -cd 'a-f0-9' | head -c 32
why do not use unix mktemp command:
$ TMPFILE=`mktemp tmp.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX` && echo $TMPFILE
tmp.MnxEsPDsNUjrzDIiPhnWZKmlAXAO8983
One command, no pipe, no loop:
hexdump -n 16 -v -e '/1 "%02X"' -e '/16 "\n"' /dev/urandom
If you don't need the newline, for example when you're using it in a variable:
hexdump -n 16 -v -e '/1 "%02X"' /dev/urandom
Using "16" generates 32 hex digits.
uuidgen generates exactly this, except you have to remove hyphens. So I found this to be the most elegant (at least to me) way of achieving this. It should work on linux and OS X out of the box.
uuidgen | tr -d '-'
As you probably noticed from each of the answers, you generally have to "resort to a program".
However, without using any external executables, in Bash and ksh:
string=''; for i in {0..31}; do string+=$(printf "%x" $(($RANDOM%16)) ); done; echo $string
in zsh:
string=''; for i in {0..31}; do string+=$(printf "%x" $(($RANDOM%16)) ); dummy=$RANDOM; done; echo $string
Change the lower case x in the format string to an upper case X to make the alphabetic hex characters upper case.
Here's another way to do it in Bash but without an explicit loop:
printf -v string '%X' $(printf '%.2s ' $((RANDOM%16))' '{00..31})
In the following, "first" and "second" printf refers to the order in which they're executed rather than the order in which they appear in the line.
This technique uses brace expansion to produce a list of 32 random numbers mod 16 each followed by a space and one of the numbers in the range in braces followed by another space (e.g. 11 00). For each element of that list, the first printf strips off all but the first two characters using its format string (%.2) leaving either single digits followed by a space each or two digits. The space in the format string ensures that there is then at least one space between each output number.
The command substitution containing the first printf is not quoted so that word splitting is performed and each number goes to the second printf as a separate argument. There, the numbers are converted to hex by the %X format string and they are appended to each other without spaces (since there aren't any in the format string) and the result is stored in the variable named string.
When printf receives more arguments than its format string accounts for, the format is applied to each argument in turn until they are all consumed. If there are fewer arguments, the unmatched format string (portion) is ignored, but that doesn't apply in this case.
I tested it in Bash 3.2, 4.4 and 5.0-alpha. But it doesn't work in zsh (5.2) or ksh (93u+) because RANDOM only gets evaluated once in the brace expansion in those shells.
Note that because of using the mod operator on a value that ranges from 0 to 32767 the distribution of digits using the snippets could be skewed (not to mention the fact that the numbers are pseudo random in the first place). However, since we're using mod 16 and 32768 is divisible by 16, that won't be a problem here.
In any case, the correct way to do this is using mktemp as in Oleg Razgulyaev's answer.
Tested in zsh, should work with any BASH compatible shell!
#!/bin/zsh
SUM=`md5sum <<EOF
$RANDOM
EOF`
FN=`echo $SUM | awk '// { print $1 }'`
echo "Your new filename: $FN"
Example:
$ zsh ranhash.sh
Your new filename: 2485938240bf200c26bb356bbbb0fa32
$ zsh ranhash.sh
Your new filename: ad25cb21bea35eba879bf3fc12581cc9
Yet another way[tm].
R=$(echo $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM $RANDOM | md5 | cut -c -8)
FILENAME="abcdef-$R"
This answer is very similar to fmarks, so I cannot really take credit for it, but I found the cat and tr command combinations quite slow, and I found this version quite a bit faster. You need hexdump.
hexdump -e '/1 "%02x"' -n32 < /dev/urandom
Another thing you can add is running the date command as follows:
date +%S%N
Reads nonosecond time and the result adds a lot of randomness.
The first answer is good but why fork cat if not required.
tr -dc 'a-f0-9' < /dev/urandom | head -c32
Grab 16 bytes from /dev/random, convert them to hex, take the first line, remove the address, remove the spaces.
head /dev/random -c16 | od -tx1 -w16 | head -n1 | cut -d' ' -f2- | tr -d ' '
Assuming that "without resorting to a program" means "using only programs that are readily available", of course.
If you have openssl in your system you can use it for generating random hex (also it can be -base64) strings with defined length. I found it pretty simple and usable in cron in one line jobs.
openssl rand -hex 32
8c5a7515837d7f0b19e7e6fa4c448400e70ffec88ecd811a3dce3272947cb452
Hope to add a (maybe) better solution to this topic.
Notice: this only works with bash4 and some implement of mktemp(for example, the GNU one)
Try this
fn=$(mktemp -u -t 'XXXXXX')
echo ${fn/\/tmp\//}
This one is twice as faster as head /dev/urandom | tr -cd 'a-f0-9' | head -c 32, and eight times as faster as cat /dev/urandom | tr -cd 'a-f0-9' | head -c 32.
Benchmark:
With mktemp:
#!/bin/bash
# a.sh
for (( i = 0; i < 1000; i++ ))
do
fn=$(mktemp -u -t 'XXXXXX')
echo ${fn/\/tmp\//} > /dev/null
done
time ./a.sh
./a.sh 0.36s user 1.97s system 99% cpu 2.333 total
And the other:
#!/bin/bash
# b.sh
for (( i = 0; i < 1000; i++ ))
do
cat /dev/urandom | tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' | head -c 32 > /dev/null
done
time ./b.sh
./b.sh 0.52s user 20.61s system 113% cpu 18.653 total
If you are on Linux, then Python will come pre-installed. So you can go for something similar to the below:
python -c "import uuid; print str(uuid.uuid1())"
If you don't like the dashes, then use replace function as shown below
python -c "import uuid; print str(uuid.uuid1()).replace('-','')"
What is the simplest way to parse line continuation characters? This seems like such a basic action that I'm surprised there's no basic command for doing this. 'while read' and 'while read -r' loops don't do what I want, and the easiest solution I've found is the sed solution below. Is there a way to do this with something basic like tr?
$ cat input
Output should be \
one line with a '\' character.
$ while read l; do echo $l; done < input
Output should be one line with a '' character.
$ while read -r l; do echo $l; done < input
Output should be \
one line with a '\' character.
$ sed '/\\$/{N; s/\\\n//;}' input
Output should be one line with a '\' character.
$ perl -0777 -pe 's/\\\n//s' input
Output should be one line with a '\' character.
If by "simplest" you mean concise and legible, I'd suggest your perl-ism with one small modification:
$ perl -pe 's/\\\n//' /tmp/line-cont
No need for the possibly memory intensive ... -0777 ... (whole file slurp mode) switch.
If, however, by "simplest" you mean not the leaving shell, this will suffice:
$ { while read -r LINE; do
printf "%s" "${LINE%\\}"; # strip line-continuation, if any
test "${LINE##*\\}" && echo; # emit newline for non-continued lines
done; } < /tmp/input
(I prefer printf "%s" $USER_INPUT to echo $USER_INPUT because echo cannot portably be told to stop looking for switches, and printf is commonly a built-in anyway.)
Just tuck that in a user-defined function and never be revolted by it again. Caution: this latter approach will add a trailing newline to a file which lacks one.
The regex way looks like the way to go.
I would go with the Perl solution simply because it will likely be the most extensible if you want to add more functionality later.
I want my ksh script to have different behaviors depending on whether there is something incoming through stdin or not:
(1) cat file.txt | ./script.ksh (then do "cat <&0 >./tmp.dat" and process tmp.dat)
vs. (2) ./script.ksh (then process $1 which must be a readable regular file)
Checking for stdin to see if it is a terminal[ -t 0 ] is not helpful, because my script is called from an other script.
Doing "cat <&0 >./tmp.dat" to check tmp.dat's size hangs up waiting for an EOF from stdin if stdin is "empty" (2nd case).
How to just check if stdin is "empty" or not?!
EDIT: You are running on HP-UX
Tested [ -t 0 ] on HP-UX and it appears to be working for me. I have used the following setup:
/tmp/x.ksh:
#!/bin/ksh
/tmp/y.ksh
/tmp/y.ksh:
#!/bin/ksh
test -t 0 && echo "terminal!"
Running /tmp/x.ksh prints: terminal!
Could you confirm the above on your platform, and/or provide an alternate test setup more closely reflecting your situation? Is your script ultimately spawned by cron?
EDIT 2
If desperate, and if Perl is available, define:
stdin_ready() {
TIMEOUT=$1; shift
perl -e '
my $rin = "";
vec($rin,fileno(STDIN),1) = 1;
select($rout=$rin, undef, undef, '$TIMEOUT') < 1 && exit 1;
'
}
stdin_ready 1 || 'stdin not ready in 1 second, assuming terminal'
EDIT 3
Please note that the timeout may need to be significant if your input comes from sort, ssh etc. (all these programs can spawn and establish the pipe with your script seconds or minutes before producing any data over it.) Also, using a hefty timeout may dramatically penalize your script when there is nothing on the input to begin with (e.g. terminal.)
If potentially large timeouts are a problem, and if you can influence the way in which your script is called, then you may want to force the callers to explicitly instruct your program whether stdin should be used, via a custom option or in the standard GNU or tar manner (e.g. script [options [--]] FILE ..., where FILE can be a file name, a - to denote standard input, or a combination thereof, and your script would only read from standard input if - were passed in as a parameter.)
This strategy works for bash, and would likely work for ksh. Poll 'tty':
#!/bin/bash
set -a
if [ "$( tty )" == 'not a tty' ]
then
STDIN_DATA_PRESENT=1
else
STDIN_DATA_PRESENT=0
fi
if [ ${STDIN_DATA_PRESENT} -eq 1 ]
then
echo "Input was found."
else
echo "Input was not found."
fi
Why not solve this in a more traditional way, and use the command line argument to indicate that the data will be coming from stdin?
For an example, consider the difference between:
echo foo | cat -
and
echo foo > /tmp/test.txt
cat /tmp/test.txt
I ended up writing a quick little script for this in Python, but I was wondering if there was a utility you could feed text into which would prepend each line with some text -- in my specific case, a timestamp. Ideally, the use would be something like:
cat somefile.txt | prepend-timestamp
(Before you answer sed, I tried this:
cat somefile.txt | sed "s/^/`date`/"
But that only evaluates the date command once when sed is executed, so the same timestamp is incorrectly prepended to each line.)
ts from moreutils will prepend a timestamp to every line of input you give it. You can format it using strftime too.
$ echo 'foo bar baz' | ts
Mar 21 18:07:28 foo bar baz
$ echo 'blah blah blah' | ts '%F %T'
2012-03-21 18:07:30 blah blah blah
$
To install it:
sudo apt-get install moreutils
Could try using awk:
<command> | awk '{ print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), $0; fflush(); }'
You may need to make sure that <command> produces line buffered output, i.e. it flushes its output stream after each line; the timestamp awk adds will be the time that the end of the line appeared on its input pipe.
If awk shows errors, then try gawk instead.
annotate, available via that link or as annotate-output in the Debian devscripts package.
$ echo -e "a\nb\nc" > lines
$ annotate-output cat lines
17:00:47 I: Started cat lines
17:00:47 O: a
17:00:47 O: b
17:00:47 O: c
17:00:47 I: Finished with exitcode 0
Distilling the given answers to the simplest one possible:
unbuffer $COMMAND | ts
On Ubuntu, they come from the expect-dev and moreutils packages.
sudo apt-get install expect-dev moreutils
How about this?
cat somefile.txt | perl -pne 'print scalar(localtime()), " ";'
Judging from your desire to get live timestamps, maybe you want to do live updating on a log file or something? Maybe
tail -f /path/to/log | perl -pne 'print scalar(localtime()), " ";' > /path/to/log-with-timestamps
Kieron's answer is the best one so far. If you have problems because the first program is buffering its out you can use the unbuffer program:
unbuffer <command> | awk '{ print strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), $0; }'
It's installed by default on most linux systems. If you need to build it yourself it is part of the expect package
http://expect.nist.gov
Just gonna throw this out there: there are a pair of utilities in daemontools called tai64n and tai64nlocal that are made for prepending timestamps to log messages.
Example:
cat file | tai64n | tai64nlocal
Use the read(1) command to read one line at a time from standard input, then output the line prepended with the date in the format of your choosing using date(1).
$ cat timestamp
#!/bin/sh
while read line
do
echo `date` $line
done
$ cat somefile.txt | ./timestamp
I'm not an Unix guy, but I think you can use
gawk '{print strftime("%d/%m/%y",systime()) $0 }' < somefile.txt
#! /bin/sh
unbuffer "$#" | perl -e '
use Time::HiRes (gettimeofday);
while(<>) {
($s,$ms) = gettimeofday();
print $s . "." . $ms . " " . $_;
}'
$ cat somefile.txt | sed "s/^/`date`/"
you can do this (with gnu/sed):
$ some-command | sed "x;s/.*/date +%T/e;G;s/\n/ /g"
example:
$ { echo 'line1'; sleep 2; echo 'line2'; } | sed "x;s/.*/date +%T/e;G;s/\n/ /g"
20:24:22 line1
20:24:24 line2
of course, you can use other options of the program date. just replace date +%T with what you need.
Here's my awk solution (from a Windows/XP system with MKS Tools installed in the C:\bin directory). It is designed to add the current date and time in the form mm/dd hh:mm to the beginning of each line having fetched that timestamp from the system as each line is read. You could, of course, use the BEGIN pattern to fetch the timestamp once and add that timestamp to each record (all the same). I did this to tag a log file that was being generated to stdout with the timestamp at the time the log message was generated.
/"pattern"/ "C\:\\\\bin\\\\date '+%m/%d %R'" | getline timestamp;
print timestamp, $0;
where "pattern" is a string or regex (without the quotes) to be matched in the input line, and is optional if you wish to match all input lines.
This should work on Linux/UNIX systems as well, just get rid of the C\:\\bin\\ leaving the line
"date '+%m/%d %R'" | getline timestamp;
This, of course, assumes that the command "date" gets you to the standard Linux/UNIX date display/set command without specific path information (that is, your environment PATH variable is correctly configured).
Mixing some answers above from natevw and Frank Ch. Eigler.
It has milliseconds, performs better than calling a external date command each time and perl can be found in most of the servers.
tail -f log | perl -pne '
use Time::HiRes (gettimeofday);
use POSIX qw(strftime);
($s,$ms) = gettimeofday();
print strftime "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+$ms ", gmtime($s);
'
Alternative version with flush and read in a loop:
tail -f log | perl -pne '
use Time::HiRes (gettimeofday); use POSIX qw(strftime);
$|=1;
while(<>) {
($s,$ms) = gettimeofday();
print strftime "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+$ms $_", gmtime($s);
}'
caerwyn's answer can be run as a subroutine, which would prevent the new processes per line:
timestamp(){
while read line
do
echo `date` $line
done
}
echo testing 123 |timestamp
Disclaimer: the solution I am proposing is not a Unix built-in utility.
I faced a similar problem a few days ago. I did not like the syntax and limitations of the solutions above, so I quickly put together a program in Go to do the job for me.
You can check the tool here: preftime
There are prebuilt executables for Linux, MacOS, and Windows in the Releases section of the GitHub project.
The tool handles incomplete output lines and has (from my point of view) a more compact syntax.
<command> | preftime
It's not ideal, but I though I'd share it in case it helps someone.
The other answers mostly work, but have some drawbacks. In particular:
Many require installing a command not commonly found on linux systems, which may not be possible or convenient.
Since they use pipes, they don't put timestamps on stderr, and lose the exit status.
If you use multiple pipes for stderr and stdout, then some do not have atomic printing, leading to intermingled lines of output like [timestamp] [timestamp] stdout line \nstderr line
Buffering can cause problems, and unbuffer requires an extra dependency.
To solve (4), we can use stdbuf -i0 -o0 -e0 which is generally available on most linux systems (see How to make output of any shell command unbuffered?).
To solve (3), you just need to be careful to print the entire line at a time.
Bad: ruby -pe 'print Time.now.strftime(\"[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] \")' (Prints the timestamp, then prints the contents of $_.)
Good: ruby -pe '\$_ = Time.now.strftime(\"[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] \") + \$_' (Alters $_, then prints it.)
To solve (2), we need to use multiple pipes and save the exit status:
alias tslines-pipe="stdbuf -i0 -o0 ruby -pe '\$_ = Time.now.strftime(\"[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] \") + \$_'"
function tslines() (
stdbuf -o0 -e0 "$#" 2> >(tslines-pipe) > >(tslines-pipe)
status="$?"
exit $status
)
Then you can run a command with tslines some command --options.
This almost works, except sometimes one of the pipes takes slightly longer to exit and the tslines function has exited, so the next prompt has printed. For example, this command seems to print all the output after the prompt for the next line has appeared, which can be a bit confusing:
tslines bash -c '(for (( i=1; i<=20; i++ )); do echo stderr 1>&2; echo stdout; done)'
There needs to be some coordination method between the two pipe processes and the tslines function. There are presumably many ways to do this. One way I found is to have the pipes send some lines to a pipe that the main function can listen to, and only exit after it's received data from both pipe handlers. Putting that together:
alias tslines-pipe="stdbuf -i0 -o0 ruby -pe '\$_ = Time.now.strftime(\"[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] \") + \$_'"
function tslines() (
# Pick a random name for the pipe to prevent collisions.
pipe="/tmp/pipe-$RANDOM"
# Ensure the pipe gets deleted when the method exits.
trap "rm -f $pipe" EXIT
# Create the pipe. See https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-named-pipes-fifos-bash
mkfifo "$pipe"
# echo will block until the pipe is read.
stdbuf -o0 -e0 "$#" 2> >(tslines-pipe; echo "done" >> $pipe) > >(tslines-pipe; echo "done" >> $pipe)
status="$?"
# Wait until we've received data from both pipe commands before exiting.
linecount=0
while [[ $linecount -lt 2 ]]; do
read line
if [[ "$line" == "done" ]]; then
((linecount++))
fi
done < "$pipe"
exit $status
)
That synchronization mechanism feels a bit convoluted; hopefully there's a simpler way to do it.
doing it with date and tr and xargs on OSX:
alias predate="xargs -I{} sh -c 'date +\"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S\" | tr \"\n\" \" \"; echo \"{}\"'"
<command> | predate
if you want milliseconds:
alias predate="xargs -I{} sh -c 'date +\"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%3N\" | tr \"\n\" \" \"; echo \"{}\"'"
but note that on OSX, date doesn't give you the %N option, so you'll need to install gdate (brew install coreutils) and so finally arrive at this:
alias predate="xargs -I{} sh -c 'gdate +\"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%3N\" | tr \"\n\" \" \"; echo \"{}\"'"
No need to specify all the parameters in strftime() unless you really want to customize the outputting format :
echo "abc 123 xyz\njan 765 feb" \
\
| gawk -Sbe 'BEGIN {_=strftime()" "} sub("^",_)'
Sat Apr 9 13:14:53 EDT 2022 abc 123 xyz
Sat Apr 9 13:14:53 EDT 2022 jan 765 feb
works the same if you have mawk 1.3.4. Even on awk-variants without the time features, a quick getline could emulate it :
echo "abc 123 xyz\njan 765 feb" \
\
| mawk2 'BEGIN { (__="date")|getline _;
close(__)
_=_" " } sub("^",_)'
Sat Apr 9 13:19:38 EDT 2022 abc 123 xyz
Sat Apr 9 13:19:38 EDT 2022 jan 765 feb
If you wanna skip all that getline and BEGIN { }, then something like this :
mawk2 'sub("^",_" ")' \_="$(date)"
If the value you are prepending is the same on every line, fire up emacs with the file, then:
Ctrl + <space>
at the beginning of the of the file (to mark that spot), then scroll down to the beginning of the last line (Alt + > will go to the end of file... which probably will involve the Shift key too, then Ctrl + a to go to the beginning of that line) and:
Ctrl + x r t
Which is the command to insert at the rectangle you just specified (a rectangle of 0 width).
2008-8-21 6:45PM <enter>
Or whatever you want to prepend... then you will see that text prepended to every line within the 0 width rectangle.
UPDATE: I just realized you don't want the SAME date, so this won't work... though you may be able to do this in emacs with a slightly more complicated custom macro, but still, this kind of rectangle editing is pretty nice to know about...