Sstrhsrtj

An alternative very lightweight option is just to 'tail' everything but the first line (this can be an easy way to remove file headers generally):

# -n +2 : start at line 2 of the file.

tail -n +2 file.txt > file.stdout

Following @Evan Teitelman, you can:

tail -n +2 file.txt | sponge file.txt

To avoid a temporary file. Another option might be:

echo "$(tail -n +2 file.txt)" > file.txt

And so forth. Testing last one:

[user@work ~]$ cat file.txt

line 1

line 2

line 3

line 4

line 5



[user@work ~]$ echo "$(tail -n +2 file.txt)" > file.txt

[user@work ~]$ cat file.txt

line 2

line 3

line 4

line 5

[user@work ~]$ 

Oops we lost a newline (per @1_CR comment below), try instead:

printf "%snn" "$(tail -n +2 file.txt)" > file.txt



[user@work ~]$ cat file.txt

line 1

line 2

line 3

line 4

line 5



[user@work ~]$ printf '%snn' "$(tail -n +2 file.txt)" > file.txt

[user@work ~]$ cat file.txt

line 2

line 3

line 4

line 5  



[user@work ~]$ 

Coming back to sed, try:

printf '%snn' "$(sed '1d' file.txt)" > file.txt

or perhaps

echo -e "$(sed '1d' file.txt)n" > file.txt

To avoid side effects.

Also take a look at sponge from
moreutils. sponge soaks in data from
standard input until standard input's writing end closes before writing to a
file. It is used like so:

sed '1d' file.txt | sponge file.txt

This topic is interest, so I test the benchmark in 3 ways:

1. sed '1d' d.txt > tmp.txt


2. tail -n +2 d.txt > tmp.txt


3. 
   sed -i '1d' d.txt

Note that target d.txt is 5.4GB file

Get the result :

run 1 : sed '1d' d.txt > r1.txt

14s

run 2 : tail -n +2 d.txt > r2.txt

20s

run 3 : sed -i '1d' d.txt

88s

Conclusion : It seems below be the quickest way:

sed '1d' file.txt > tmpfile; mv tmpfile file.txt

ex can be used for true in-place editing that does not involve a temp file

ex -c ':1d' -c ':wq' file.txt

You can use Vim in Ex mode:

ex -s -c '1d|x' file.txt

1. 1 find first line




2. d delete




3. x save and close

The shortest and simplest way to delete the first line from a file using sed is:

$ sed -i -n -e '2,$p' file.txt

This command will remove 1 line and save as "file.txt".

sed '1d' file.txt  > /tmp/file.txt && mv /tmp/file.txt file.txt || rm -f /tmp/file.txt

To Delete a praticiler line in file

1. Delete first line

Sed '1d' file

2. Delete first and third line

Sed '1d3d' file

Delete charecter in line

1 Delete First two charter in lin

Sed 's/^..//' file

2 Delete last two chrectercin line

Sed 's/..£//' file

3 Delete blank line

Sed '/^£/d' file

Could use vim to do this:

vim -u NONE +'1d' +wq! /tmp/test.txt

cat file01 | sed -e '1,3d'

// show content in file01 but remove the first and third line