Matching everything on a line using sed

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I having a little trouble. I want to substitute whatever is on the first line no matter what is on it with the word BEGINNING. So on the first line, the only word on it is BEGINNING

I tried the following:

sed '1,1s/^ *.*$/BEGINNING/g' $FILE

It works only if the 1st line starts with a space.

I tried

sed '1,1s/^*.*$/BEGINNING/g' $FILE

does not work.

There is got to be a catchall expression that would make whatever is on the line; alpha-numeric, special characters, etc. match up and replace it.

Any help is appreciated.

2

You're almost there, the dot means "any single character", if you repeat it multiple times (*) you obtain:

sed "1s/^.*$/BEGINNING/" $FILE
3

Thanks that did it.