How to use sed to replace only the first occurrence in a file?

Question

I would like to update a large number of C++ source files with an extra include directive before any existing #includes. For this sort of task, I normally use a small bash s

Answer 1

You could use awk to do something similar..

awk '/#include/ && !done { print "#include \"newfile.h\""; done=1;}; 1;' file.c

Explanation:

/#include/ && !done

Runs the action statement between {} when the line matches "#include" and we haven't already processed it.

{print "#include \"newfile.h\""; done=1;}

This prints #include "newfile.h", we need to escape the quotes. Then we set the done variable to 1, so we don't add more includes.

1;

This means "print out the line" - an empty action defaults to print $0, which prints out the whole line. A one liner and easier to understand than sed IMO :-)