Folks, I have a number of text files of poetry that I'd like to add line numbers to for concordancing, starting the numbering at 1 and continuing to the last text line, with the line numbers ending up as part of the resulting text file, each number on the relevant line before the text of that line of verse begins.
I've done this before a few times a while ago, but danged if I can remember what I used. I know I didn't write anything to do it, though I assume it's pretty easy to do so. I think it was in a text editor or word processor, but looking at vi and emacs it looks like I can only get the line numbers to display with the file, not to be added to the file, and that's true of some Windows ones as well and of Word, unless there are tricks.
The UNIX/Linux "nl" utility does basically what I want (if I pipe the output to a file, I get my text file back but with a line number and a tab added to the beginning of each line), and I can deal with the output but I remember (possibly from one of those technicolor dreams--you'll let me know!) a more interactive, less command-liney, way of doing this that would make this stage easier.
Thanks for any help.
Murray McGillivray