Is there a way to get a list of file names and the first line of text listed on the same line in Linux?

Question

I am trying to get a list of file names in a directory and the first line of text from each file and output each pair to a single line to be output to a .csv file.

I have tried a bunch of different methods of using head, ls, find, and grep and combinations of these but can't seem to get the results to print onto a single line. Closest I have gotten was getting them to print on separate lines.

Here is an example of the output I would need:

filename1.txt "this is the first line of text"
filename2.txt "this is the first line of text"

I'm not really concerned with having extra characters or anything in the results, as I can edit that out easily in Excel once I have them on the same line.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

To obtain filenames and first lines for all files in the directory, try:

awk '{print FILENAME" \"" $0"\""; nextfile}' *

To obtain filenames and first lines for all files whose names start with 328, try:

awk '{print FILENAME" \"" $0"\""; nextfile}' 328*

Example

Consider a directory with these two files:

$ cat filename1.txt
this is the first line of text
2
3
$ cat filename2.txt
this is the first line of text
b
c

Now, run our command:

$ awk '{print FILENAME" \"" $0"\""; nextfile}' *
filename1.txt "this is the first line of text"
filename2.txt "this is the first line of text"

How it works

• `awk '{...}' *

  This starts awk and runs the commands inside the curly braces. With the glob *, this is run for all files. The glob can be limited to, for example, 328*.txt to work on all files whose names start with 328 and end with .txt.

  By default awk will read one line at a time for each file in turn.

• print FILENAME" \"" $0"\""

  This tells awk to print the filename followed by " followed by the first line, $0, followed by another ".

• nextfile

  Since we have no interest in reading the second line, this tells awk to skip to the next file.

Saving to file

We can save the first lines to a file like this:

$ awk '{print FILENAME" \"" $0"\""; nextfile}' *.txt >output.txt

The output.txt file looks like:

$ cat output.txt
filename1.txt "this is the first line of text"
filename2.txt "this is the first line of text"

Answer 2

If i rightly understand what you are asking for, this can do it

for i in *.*
do
   FL=`head -1 $i`
   echo "$i \"$FL\""
done

For your requirement you can try this

OP_FILE="op.csv"
>$OP_FILE
for i in 328*.*
do
  FL=`head -1 $i`
  echo "$i \"$FL\"" >> $OP_FILE
done