Deleting first two lines from a text-file

[thoresson]

Hi,

I want to remove the first two line from a textfile. Trying with

Code: Select all

sed '1,2d' "$1"

as a shell script doesn't work. Why not?

Thanks,
Anders

[a_freyer]

You need to write back to the file - without that your file content is going to STDOUT (i.e. Hazel logs):

Code: Select all

sed '1,2d' "$1" > "$1"

[thoresson]

Of course, to write the result to disk makes sense Problem is that the suggested command gives me an empty file, with a size of zero bytes. Why?

[a_freyer]

Perhaps the rule is running multiple times such that the top two lines are deleted until the file is empty.

[thoresson]

Possible, but I don't think so. The script is as follows:

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sed '1,2d' "$1" > "$1"
cat "$1" >> "/Users/anders/Dropbox/Private/ideas.md"


Nothing is added to ideas.md. But if I only use cat, excluding sed, content is appended to ideas.md.

[a_freyer]

Why not this:

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sed '1,2d' "$1" >> "/Users/anders/Dropbox/Private/ideas.md"

[thoresson]

Probably because my scripting skills aren't that good.

Thanks, now it works as I want it to.