Removing the first Charater in a text file

[Marty Metras]

I have a strange thing I want to do.
In our Apps when it greneates a text file for the printer it inserts a formfeed (Control L I think) causing an leading blank page on all our printers. If I turn off the Formfeed in the Apps then there is no page break at all and this is messy.
Here is what I want to do and need a little help.
The Apps has a Printer filter script that adds the the printer controls (like -onp, -o compress, etc). In here is could add a shortscript that removes the first charater if it is a formfeed.
My question is what is an easy way to remove just the first charater?
Must be an easy way to do this.
Marty

[Mark Grant · Accepted solution]

how about something like this

#!/bin/sh
read a
a=`expr "$a" : ".\(.*\)"`
echo $a
while read a
do
echo $a
done

then run by piping your file into this script.
Probably prettier ways than this but this is first thing that came to mind.

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi Marty,

the following c programme you can also use as filter, if you have only this app printing, otherwise use command < textfile.
It filter a form feed/line feed in the first line.

Michael

#include "stdio.h"

void main(void)
{
ushort c;
ushort d;

d = 1;
while(!feof(stdin))
{
c = getchar();
if (d == 1)
{
if (c == 12)
{
c = getchar();
if (c == 10)
{
d = 0;
c = getchar();
}
}
}
putchar(c);
d = 0;
}
}

[Marty Metras]

Thanks guys.
I got it working.

Thanks for the help.
Marty

[Gary Hansford]

Marty,

Here's the way we do it... (for reference), then we pipe it into the print filter ...

sed -e "1 s/^L//g;\$ s/^L//g" ${file}

Gary