edit first line of long file

[Kartik Subbarao]

In article <27338 at shamash.cdc.com> ddh at dash@udev.cdc.com (Dan Horsfall) writes:
>I've seen this done somewhere, but can't for the life of me
>remember what the trick was, or where I saw it...
>
>I have a long text file.  I want to pass the first line through a
>short sed script, and ignore(i.e., pass unscathed) the rest of the
>file. 
>
>Plan A: pass the whole file thru sed, qualifing the search string
>as "1s/.../.../"; sed will look at each line of the file.
>
>Plan B: pull off the first line with "line", pass it to sed, and
>somehow magically get lines 2-n sent to stdout with cat.  I'm sure
>I've seen it done, with some combination of redirection, parentheses,
>pipes, etc., but can't reproduce it from dim menory.  

Hmm - I see what you mean, but I don't think that it involves lots of ( )'s and the like.

You can get every line after the first with tail +2 filename. So I guess you'd might want to
head -1 filename | sed whatever, then tail +2 filename >> outputfile.

As to the speed of this, I'm not sure how fast it would be.


				-Kartik




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