Automatically managing license/author/version header in source files

It is generally considered good practice to add some lines with author, version and license information to the top of source files. For instance, Gnu GPL v3 suggests to add

<one line to give the program's name and a brief idea of what it does.>
Copyright (C) <year>  <name of author>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms [SNIP]

I find it tedious to add it manually to each file, and to have to update them all every now and then when some of this information changes (new authors, copyright years, version bumps).

Is there a way to manage this automatically, so that I only have to edit this stuff in one place and it gets automagically copied around?

If needed, you may assume that I am using any modern revision control system.