How to use sed to replace only the first occurrence in a file?

Question

I would like to update a large number of C++ source files with an extra include directive before any existing #includes. For this sort of task, I normally use a small bash s

Answer 1

Quite a comprehensive collection of answers on linuxtopia sed FAQ. It also highlights that some answers people provided won't work with non-GNU version of sed, eg

sed '0,/RE/s//to_that/' file

in non-GNU version will have to be

sed -e '1s/RE/to_that/;t' -e '1,/RE/s//to_that/'

However, this version won't work with gnu sed.

Here's a version that works with both:

-e '/RE/{s//to_that/;:a' -e '$!N;$!ba' -e '}'

ex:

sed -e '/Apple/{s//Banana/;:a' -e '$!N;$!ba' -e '}' filename