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

don't have to use grep either

an example:

sed -n '/searchwords/{s/^\(.\{12\}\).*/\1/g;p}' file