Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.

command | sed -n '1,/regex/p'

If BREs can be used, this sed version will also get the job done.

By: putnamhill

2009-12-22 15:04:38

command sed sed

3 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.

Slightly simpler version of previous sed command that does the same thing. In this case, the output will stop at the command, and the entire command will be terminated as well, instead of proceeding through the whole file.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

command | sed '/regex/q'

taliver · 2009-12-29 14:52:41 4
Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.

This command line will display the output of , from the first line of output, until the first time it sees a pattern matching . You could specify the regex pattern /^$/ to look for the first blank line, or /^foobar/ to look for the first line that starts with the word foobar.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

<your command here> | perl -n -e 'print "$_" if 1 ... /<regex>/;'

SuperFly · 2009-12-22 14:06:41 5
Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.

Doesn't display the matching line. If you want that behaviour, you need to add "print && " before the 'exit'.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

<command> | perl -pe '/<regex/ && exit;'

intuited · 2009-12-22 15:05:49 5

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yeneba6574 · 19 weeks ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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