Perl: How do I remove the first line of a file without reading and copying whole file

Question

I do have a whole bunch of files in a directory and from every file I want to remove the first line (including carriage return). I can read the whole file into an array of s

Answer 1

perl -n -i -e 'print unless $. == 1' myfile

This is similar to stocherilac's answer.

But, in any case (and in all the others answer given!) you are always reading the full file. No way of avoiding that, AFAIK.

Answer 2

Oh the prefered language is Perl.

Sometimes sed is a better sed than even perl:

sed -i 1d *

Answer 3

How about

tail +2

in shell?

(edit: in newer Linux you may need tail -n +2 (thank you, GNU! :( ))

Answer 4

use Tie::File qw();
for my $filename (glob 'some_where/some_files*') {
    tie my @file, 'Tie::File', $filename or die "Could not open $filename: $!";
    shift @file;
}

Answer 5

As pointed out by Schwern, the following does not perform an early exit as I had originally thought it would:

perl -pi -e '$_ = q// and last if $. == 1;' myFile

Seems like one cannot avoid processing the whole file after all.

Answer 6

Try this one liner

perl -pi -e '$_ = "" if ( $. == 1 );' filename

I've used it before, should be all you need.