Pete Hartzler wrote, | After reading David Tamkin's post I'm going to have to unearth my sed | book; sed's man pages and info pages are all quite lame... So... So was my sed code; what was I thinking? (Brackets enclose caret, space, tab, as usual.) | sed -e '2,/^$/ !b' -e '/^[^ ][^ ]*:/! s/./ &/' or if you like braces in your sed code, | sed -e '2,/^$/{' -e '/^[^ ][^ ]*:/! s/./ &/' -e '}' Adding more indentation to a line that is already indented is harmless and not worth coding around. Also, if you want to allow only X-Command: at the top of the body and not any other additional lines for the headers, replace the two bracketed groups and the asterisk after them (but keeping the anchoring caret ahead of them) with "X-Command" (sans quotes).