First occurence of character in a file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

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

2

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.

3

How's about:

egrep -v '^$' | head -1
4

I agree !

How about:

grep '^[A-Z]' data.file | head -1
5

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

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

Regards
Dhana

6

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

sed -n '/^[A-Z]/p' filename | head -1
7

one more and single command

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