Adding Lines to text In Bulk

Cansu Bal

First of all, since English is not my native language, there may be spelling errors. I’m sorry for that.

I have approximately 300 txt files. I want to add the line I want to the 1st line of each of these files. How can I do this in bulk to 300 files?

For example, I want to add the word “testfiles” to the 1st line of txt files

normal file content

test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt

the file content I want

testfiles
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt

Additionally, as you can see in the example above, the txt files contain the text 1mayis.txt. I want to change this file name to the name of the file it is in.

For example

File name: trial_007(228).txt

file content

test -host- 73test >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\1mayis.txt

the file content I want

test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\deneme_007(228).txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\deneme_007(228).txt
test -host- teswordshere >> c:\ping\deneme_007(228).txt

Replace this part in each file with the original name of the file.

Is there a way to get this done?

Mark Olson

@Cansu-Bal
If all you wanted to do was insert some text (which is fixed, and doesn’t depend on any properties of the file) followed by a newline at the beginning of a file, you can do that using the Find/replace form, Find in files tab:
Find what: (?s)[^\r\n]*(\R)?.*
Replace with: some text(?1${1}:\r\n)${0}
Filter: *.txt (restrict to .txt files)
Directory: whatever directory you want to edit files in
In all subfolders: check if you want to edit all files in a directory’s tree, rather than just direct children of that directory.

If you’re new to this kind of thing, let me emphasize that you should always Always ALWAYS backup your files before doing a bulk find/replace.

Note that if you run this on a file with no newlines, it will insert a CRLF newline (\r\n in regular expressions) after some text. Otherwise, it will use the first newline found in the file.

If you want to do a find/replace operation on a file that uses the name of the file, you could use a plugin, but since you are doing this on a large number of files, this is a job for other tools, not for Notepad++.