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

A possible solution here might be to tell the compiler to include the header without it being mentioned in the source files. IN GCC there are these options:

   -include file
       Process file as if "#include "file"" appeared as the first line of
       the primary source file.  However, the first directory searched for
       file is the preprocessor's working directory instead of the
       directory containing the main source file.  If not found there, it
       is searched for in the remainder of the "#include "..."" search
       chain as normal.

       If multiple -include options are given, the files are included in
       the order they appear on the command line.

   -imacros file
       Exactly like -include, except that any output produced by scanning
       file is thrown away.  Macros it defines remain defined.  This
       allows you to acquire all the macros from a header without also
       processing its declarations.

       All files specified by -imacros are processed before all files
       specified by -include.

Microsoft's compiler has the /FI (forced include) option.

This feature can be handy for some common header, like platform configuration. The Linux kernel's Makefile uses -include for this.