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

I know this is an old post but I had a solution that I used to use:

grep -E -m 1 -n 'old' file | sed 's/:.*$//' - | sed 's/$/s\/old\/new\//' - | sed -f - file

Basically use grep to print the first occurrence and stop there. Additionally print line number ie 5:line. Pipe that into sed and remove the : and anything after so you are just left with a line number. Pipe that into sed which adds s/.*/replace to the end number, which results in a 1 line script which is piped into the last sed to run as a script on the file.

so if regex = #include and replace = blah and the first occurrence grep finds is on line 5 then the data piped to the last sed would be 5s/.*/blah/.

Works even if first occurrence is on the first line.