Q:

Efficient way to add two lines at the beginning of a very large file

I have a group of very large (a couple of GB's each) text files. I need to add two lines at the beginning of each of these files.
I tried using sed with the following command
sed -i '1iFirstLine'
sed -i '2iSecondLine'

The problem with sed is that it loops through the entire file, even if had to add only two lines at the beginning and therefore it takes lot of time.
Is there an alternate way to do this more efficiently, without reading the entire file?

A:

You should try
echo "1iFirstLine" > newfile.txt
echo "2iSecondLine" >> newfile.txt
cat oldfile.txt >> newfile.txt
mv newfile.txt oldfile.txt

A:

This one is perfectly working and its extremely fast too.
perl -pi -e '$.=0 if eof;print "first line\nsecond line\n" if ($.==1)' *.txt

