Have sed make substitute on string but SKIP first occurrence

Question

I have been through the sed one liners but am still having trouble with my goal. I want to substitue matching strings on all but the first occurrence of a line. My exact usa

Answer 1

You can avoid the problem with g and n

Replace all of them, then undo the first one:

sed -e 's/ /\\ /g' -e 's/\\ / /1'

Here's another method which uses the t branch-if-substituted command:

sed ':a;s/\([^ ]* .*[^\\]\) \(.*\)/\1\\ \2/;ta'

which has the advantage of leaving existing backslash-space sequences in the input intact.