Delete the first five characters on any line of a text file in Linux with sed

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Use cut:

cut -c6-

This prints each line of the input starting at column 6 (the first column is 1).

Answer 3

sed 's/^.\{,5\}//' file.dat

Answer 4

awk '{print substr($0,6)}' file