In this case the character is "^".
For example in the following format with 3 columns.
From:
1 cccc cccc 2 cta^<t cta^<tcc 3 ccc cccc^* 4 ^]a^*c^*c ^]a^*c^*c To:
1 cccc cccc 2 ctat ctatcc 3 ccc cccc 4 acc acc I'm quite sure this is possible with sed.
To match your demonstration input/output, it should just be s/\^.//g. To match the description, you need s/\^./\^/g (i.e., you've described it as removing the following character, but shown removing both the caret and the following character).
^ does not need to be escaped in the replacement: s/\^./^/g is fine.Do you mean sed 's/\^.//g' ? This removes ^ and the following character.
Here is an awk solution (just offered as another Unix tool alternative, you already have sed solutions)
awk '/^/{gsub(/\^./,"", $0)};1' data.txt gives
1 cccc cccc 2 ctat ctatcc 3 ccc cccc 4 acc acc