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shellsedgrepcharacter

Using sed, how do you print the first 'N' characters of a line?

Using sed what is an one liner to print the first n characters? I am doing the following:

grep -G 'defn -test.*' OctaneFullTest.clj  | sed ....
Solution

  • Don't use sed, use cut:

    grep .... | cut -c 1-N

    If you MUST use sed:

    grep ... | sed -e 's/^\(.\{12\}\).*/\1/'