How to write to the beginning of a file using shell script in Linux Suppose, we have a file release.txt and we want to write to first line of the of the file whenever a new release is made. sed -i '1i\'"text to write " filename Using the above command as sed -i '1i\'"newVersion-RELEASE" release.txt This will append the text to the first line of the file release.txt In the example shown above , we have added a new version 2.0.0-RELEASE to version.txt file . If you want to do this using a shell script then you can do it as follows #!/bin/bash function writeAtBeginning(){ sed -i '1i\'"$1" $2 } writeAtBeginning "$@" In the above example, we have added the new version through a shell function by passing version and file name as parameters