Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uc!shamash!hare!ddh
From: ddh@hare.cdc.com (Dan Horsfall)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: edit first line of long file
Message-ID: <27338@shamash.cdc.com>
Date: 22 Oct 90 18:20:14 GMT
Sender: news@shamash.cdc.com
Reply-To: ddh@dash@udev.cdc.com (Dan Horsfall)
Organization: Control Data Corp, Arden Hills, MN
Lines: 22
Distribution:

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.  

Anybody want to adopt this as their  quiz-of-the-day question?

--
   Horse
                                       +    Control Data Corporation      
   Dan Horsfall     +1-612-482-4622    +    4201 Lexington Ave North      
   Internet   ddh@dash.udev.cdc.com    +    Arden Hills MN 55126 USA