Terminal, add text to the end of all text files in a directory.

Jesse Smith · Feb 21, 2011

Is there any way to use Terminal to add text to the end of all Files in a directory? TexFinder X is close, but it only searches and replaces existing text. If there's not the same text at the end of every file, it can't do it.

dhracer88 · Feb 21, 2011

Sure, this should do it:

Code:

cd ~/path/to/files
for f in *; do echo 'text to be appended' >> "$f"; done

If you'd rather not type the path (in the cd part), you can type "cd " and then drag the folder onto the Terminal.

Also, if you have a lot of text to be appending, you could try this:

Create append.txt file with your content. Save this somewhere outside your directory of files.

Change the "do echo" bit to

Code:

do cat ~/path/to/append.txt >> "$f"; done

Jesse Smith · Feb 22, 2011

Thanks. That worked. I had been trying to do this...

Code:

for f in ~/html/*.html; do echo "Processing $f file.." && cat ~/close.html >> $f; done

Put your closing tags in a file... well call it close.html and we'll jsut put it in your home directory /Users/youruser/close.html. Well assume your docs are in /Users/youruser/html

Open Terminal.app and do the following command:

find ~/html -type f -name "*.html" -exec cat ~/close.html >> {} \;

but it just kept saying the directory didn't exist.

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Terminal, add text to the end of all text files in a directory.

Jesse Smith

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dhracer88

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Jesse Smith

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