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izimbra/Replace first occurrence of a string with sed

Created October 26, 2013 11:37
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Replaces first occurrence of a string in a file using sed. This was tried and worked in OS X 10.9. #osx #shell #sed
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Replace first occurrence of a string with sed
sed '1,/string/ s/string/replacement/' file
@izimbra
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izimbra commented Oct 26, 2013

This comes from StackOverflow. Some people there suggested using sed '0,/string/ s/string/replacement' but this didn't work for me on OS X 10.9.

Solution sed 's/string/replacement/1' works as well, in case of one occurrence of the string per line. Otherwise, sed will replace all occurrences of the string within the first line where it's found.

@Ojasv-Singh-Zeotap
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to change in a text file (inplace), sed -i '.txt' '1,/string/ s/string/replacement/g' ~/.zshrc works fine for me

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