Changing the first letter of every line in a file to uppercase

Question

I need to change the first letter of every line in a file to uppercase, e.g.

the bear ate the fish.
the river was too fast.

Would become:

Answer 1

Use sed:

sed  's/^\(.\)/\U\1/' yourfile > convertedfile

Little explanation:

• the ^ represents the start of a line.
• . matches any character
• \U converts to uppercase
• \( ... \) specifies a section to be referenced later (as \1 in this case); parentheses are to be escaped here.

Do not try to redirect the output to the same file in one command (i.e. > yourfile) as you will lose your data. If you want to replace in the same file then check out joelparkerhenderson's answer.