duplicating 1st row of data

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I have data in the following format:

data1
data2 data3    data4
data5 data6
data7 data8    data9
      data10

I require the final output to be:

data1
data1
data1
data1

i only require the 1st line but I need to replicate it in n rows where n is the number of rows where data exists. In this example, there are 4 rows of data(excluding data1), so I need to replicate data1 in 4 rows.

2

I have a bash solution here. Not PHP.

#! /bin/sh

LINE=$(sed -e '1,1p' INPUTFILE)

sed -e '2,s/.*/$LINE/' INPUTFILE > OUTPUTFILE

mv OUTPUTFILE INPUTFILE

Vino

3

gnu sed:

sed -n '1h;1!{g;p}'
4

Hi,

I tried with this:

sed '1h;g' $file > $TMP/field.A

and it seems ok.

May I know what is the difference with

sed -n '1h;1!{g;p}'

?

5

the difference is the number of rows.