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

To print the N first characters you can remove the N+1 characters up to the end of line:

$ sed 's/.//5g' <<< "defn-test"
defn