"You should use egrep or grep for this task, sed is a stream editor, grep is more in line with the line-at-a-time philosophy.
You need a regex that matches the start of line, whitespace, hyphen, space. Sounds like this would work:
egrep -v '^[ ]+-[ ]' filename
The -v option causes egrep to REMOVE the matching lines -- this is easier than building a regex that rejects the lines.
Example:
nobody$ egrep -v '^[ ]+-[ ]' /tmp/foof Heading - * Need to complete bar
Another - * Need to complete foo nobody$ cat /tmp/foof Heading - - Completed foo - More information - Still more * Need to complete bar - Did baz (comment blah blah) ***
Another - * Need to complete foo - Completed bar (blah comment blah) *** - Done baz nobody$ _
Dealing with Tab characters only means you need them in the bracket expressions,but that's hard to show online."
