Shell Programming and Scripting

I need a script to read the first 1000 characters of a text file regardless of how many lines it will span. So if my first line has 2000 characters i only want the first 1000 from this line, if my first and second lines have 500 character each then i want all the characters from both lines and ignore the rest of the file.

So the output should be the 1000 characters at the start of the file regardless of the how many lines it spans. Seems like a tough one but i'm sure someone can help.

Is this homework? What did you try so far?

No just something i need for a project.

Code:

 
#/bin/ksh
typeset -i n
typeset -t cnt
cnt=1000
while read line
do
    n=$(echo $line | wc -m)
    if [ $n -le $cnt ]; then
        echo $line
    else
        echo $line | cut -c 1-$cnt
        exit
    fi
    cnt=$cnt-$n
done < inputFile

Not sure if the below command works for 1000 characters, but give a try

Code:

sed 's/\(^.\{1000\}\) *.*/\1/' inputfile > outfile

Code:

 
head -c1000 inputfile > outputfile