delete first line of file only if blank using sed

Question

I have a solution for this in awk:

awk '{if (NR==1 && NF==0) next};1' somefile

but was unable to find one that worked in sed. E.g.,

sed -i.bak '/^$/{1,1d;}' somefile

ended up deleting the first blank line it found (I'm not a sed expert, so I was just trying out things). The advantage to sed in this case is that I would be able to do this w/o temporary files. ie in place.

Answer 1

Try this one:

sed '1{/^$/d}' file

Answer 2

An alternative:

sed '0,/^$/d' file

And as a bold guessing, you may want to delete all the blank lines before the first line(containing any chars), if it is the case, we can try the below:

sed '1,/^$/d' file