[nylug-talk] need sed help

[jh]

Eric Moore wrote:
> jh <jhlists at hirschman.net> writes:

> First odd, when you have a question like this, it helps to tell us
> what doesn't work about it, like "it deletes all leading whitespace,
> not just the first line".  This will help us diagnose your problem.
> 
> The numerical flags to the s command mean the n'th instance on a given
> line (or more accurately, per pattern space, but that's almost always
> a line).
> 
> So if we have this file:
> nyarlothotep:~$ cat baz
>    foo   bar   blech
>    baz   quux
> 
> We can delete the first bit of whitespace with:
> 
> nyarlothotep:~$ sed -e 's/ \+//1' baz
> foo   bar   blech
> baz   quux
> 
> or the second with:
> 
> nyarlothotep:~$ sed -e 's/ \+//2' baz
>    foobar   blech
>    bazquux
> 
> So what your command: -e 's/^[:space]*//1' does is replace the first
> instance of 0 or more space characters at the beginning of a line on
> each line (which is somewhat redundant, because there can't be a
> second instance of space at the beginning of a line).
> 
> What you really want is to use an address range:
> nyarlothotep:~$ sed -e '1s/^ \+//' baz
> foo   bar   blech
>    baz   quux
> 

Yes, I should have mentioned the symptom first.

The problem was that none of the white space in the first line (spaces 
and tabs) got stripped out. Thanks for the response.

jh