How does one delete the first known character in a string with sed?

For example, say I want to delete the first character (which is @) in the string "@ABCDEFG1234"

I want sed to verify whether "@" exists as the first character. If so, it should delete the character.

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

sed 's/^@\(.*\)/\1/'

^ means beginning of the string

@ your known char

(.*) the rest, captured

then captured block will be substituted to output Sorry, can't test it at the moment, but should be something like that

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great solution many THX yael – yael Jun 27 '10 at 14:40
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The other answer is simpler. – reinierpost Sep 14 '11 at 7:50
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There's no need to capture and replace.

sed 's/^@//'

This replaces the character @ when it's first ^ in the string, with nothing. Thus, deleting it.

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