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head and tail

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November 1st, 2006 toydi Posted in Text Manipulation, head, tail | Hits: 5283 |

Given a list of text lines in a file, to display the first 10 lines:

head foo.txt

To display the last 10 lines:

tail foo.txt

Try -n option to specify the number of lines to display:

tail -n3 foo.txt  # the last 3 lines
head -n4 foo.txt  # the first 4 lines

And don’t forget, the '+' in tail and '-' in head:

tail -n+10 foo.txt  # start from the 10th line til the last
head -n-10 foo.txt  # print all, except the last 10 lines

Updates: Inspired by mysurface’s comment, to display the file from 4th line to to 10th line:

head -n10 foo.txt | tail -n+4  # 4th line to 10th line
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One Response to “head and tail”

  1. mysurface Says:
    November 2nd, 2006 at 1:44 pm

    head and tail can be combined to create a combo, let say I wanna print a file from line 6 to line 10, I can do this:

    head -n10 foo.txt | tail -n5

    To indicate that i extract the correct line, i can do this.

    head -n10 foo.txt | nl | tail -n5

    Place a command to print the line number nl in between the head and tail.

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