Using sed, how do you print the first 'N' characters of a line?

Question

Using sed what is an one liner to print the first n characters? I am doing the following:

grep -G \'defn -test.*\' OctaneFullTest.clj          


        

Answer 1

colrm x

For example, if you need the first 100 characters:

cat file |colrm 101 

It's been around for years and is in most linux's and bsd's (freebsd for sure), usually by default. I can't remember ever having to type apt-get install colrm.