First-line-only editing, part 2: Portable solutions

[Dave Burton]

In article <16471:Oct2420:13:4390 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
|X-Original-Subject: Re: edit first line of long file
|As shown in my previous message, sed is much slower than a head-sed-cat
|combination on a particular 300K file. ...

Not (necessarily) so.

| So the fastest portable solution I've seen is
|  head -1 file | sed 's/.../.../'; tail +2 file

Try:

sed 's/.../.../;1q' < file > outfile

Nuff said.
--
Dave Burton			    | "You can lead a moron to water,
daveb at nostromo.austin.ibm.com	    |  but you can't make him think."
cs.utexas.edu!ibmchs!nostromo!daveb | -- stevea at i88.isc.com