First occurence of character in a file - Shell Programming and Scripting

dhanamurthy · #1 (**permalink**) 05-12-2008

Hi All

I have the following contents in a file say in a file name called 'FILE1'

*********** Start of the file **************

SANDIO000456GROJ8900

SANDIO2338923GRJH900

*********** End of the file *******************

I want to cut the first line which has the characters. You may note that few lines of the file has blank lines in the start. Only after few lines you can see the strings.

In this case i want to get SANDIO000456GROJ8900.
Will this be possible in sed ? (Any direct single line command is appreciated)

Regards
Dhana

Annihilannic · #2 (**permalink**) 05-12-2008

No offence Dhana, but do you ever actually try anything yourself first before posting here? You will never learn how to use these tools unless you try to figure things out for yourself.

Smiling Dragon · #3 (**permalink**) 05-12-2008

How's about:

Code:

egrep -v '^$' | head -1

danmero · #4 (**permalink**) 05-12-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Annihilannic

You will never learn how to use these tools unless you try to figure things out for yourself.

I agree !

How about:

Code:

grep '^[A-Z]' data.file | head -1

dhanamurthy · #5 (**permalink**) 05-12-2008

Hi
I tried with
cat filename|sed '^$d'|head -1

Even the examples provided by you did work.
Thank you so much.

Regards
Dhana

danmero · #6 (**permalink**) 05-12-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by dhanamurthy

cat filename|sed '^$d'|head -1
Dhana

First, that's Useless use of cat , second your snippet don't work. Maybe:

Code:

sed -n '/^[A-Z]/p' filename | head -1

matrixmadhan · #7 (**permalink**) 05-12-2008

one more and single command

Code:

awk '/^[A-Za-z]/{ print; exit }' filename

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