Removing N first characters from each line in a file

I recently had to remove the 5 first characters from each line in a text file; it was a source code file copied from the internet with the line numbers included. I found a nice way to do this in a forum post:

sed -i 's/\(.\{5\}\)//' file.m

Here, the "sed" function of the Linux command line is used with the -i (for "in place") switch to remove the 5 first characters from each line in the file "file.m". It looks a bit messy, but it works.