How can I prepend a string to the beginning of each line in a file?

Question

I have the following bash code which loops through a text file, line by line .. im trying to prefix the work \'prefix\' to each line but instead am getting this error:

Answer 1

Instead of the for loop, it is more appropriate to use while read...:

while read -r line; do
do
    echo "$line" | sed -e 's/^/prefix/'
done < $file

But you would be much better off with the simpler:

sed -e 's/^/prefix/' $file