Replace only the first occurence matching a regex with sed

Question

I have a string

test:growTest:ret

And with sed i would to delete only test: to get :

growTest:ret

I tried with

sed '0,/RE/s/^.*://'

But it only gives me

ret

Any ideas ?

Thanks

Answer 1

Modify your regexp ^.*: to ^[^:]*:

All you need is that the .* construction won't consume your delimiter — the colon. To do this, replace matching-any-char . with negated brackets: [^abc], that match any char except specified.

Also, don't confuse the two circumflexes ^, as they have different meanings: first one matches beginning of string, second one means negated brackets.