I need a one-liner to remove the first five characters on any line of a text file. How can I do that with sed?
sed 's/^.....//'
means
replace ("s", substitute) beginning-of-line then 5 characters (".") with nothing.
There are more compact or flexible ways to write this using sed or cut.
awk '{print substr($0,6)}' file
sed 's/^.\{,5\}//' file.dat
worked like a charm for me
sed 's/^.\{,5\}//' file.dat
Use cut:
cut -c6-
This prints each line of the input starting at column 6 (the first column is 1).