Writing multiple lines of code to a file in linux

Sometimes it’s needed to create multiple files, repeatadly with linux. This should work with any of the major distros: CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc.

This also assumes the file does not exist already, if it does exist, it will append this info to the end of the file that already exists.

cat >> ifcfg-eth0 << EOF
TYPE=Ethernet
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
EOF

You can now type cat ifcfg-eth0 and it will output the 4 lines above.

If that is not to your liking, you could always use something like echo with append statements. Like this:

echo "TYPE=Ethernet" >> ifcfg-eth0
echo "DEVICE=eth0" >> ifcfg-eth0
echo "BOOTPROTO=none" >> ifcfg-eth0
echo "ONBOOT=yes" >> ifcfg-eth0

The >> option appends the echo information into a file name. But if you do > it will overwrite all lines in the file.

Enjoy!