pre-apend to a text file

Question

I want to pre-append some text a a CSV file that is created by MySQL.

Basically I want to add the header information for the rows so when the user opens it in Excel they know what each column is.

Whats the best way to do this. I presume there is some easy linux command that can do this? I can also do it in the PHP script. I'd like to know how to do both just for educational purposes.

General setup:

Debian Etc LAMP website Cron calls a PHP script which creates the csv file every night.

Thanks, Derek

Answer 1

Instead of pre-pending the header text to the data file, start with file which contains the header and then append the data/CSV file to this header file.

Answer 2

You can do for example this:

echo "header information" | cat - data.csv > dataInfo.csv

echo prints the header, cat takes this header from standard input and writes it together with everything from data.csv then into dataInfo.csv