head and tail

November 1st, 2006 toydi Posted in head, tail, Text Manipulation | Hits: 62068 | 5 Comments »

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
Related Posts
Top Ten Processes Watcher
top command provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It can display system summary information as well as ...

I am watching you
To repeatly watching a certain file, such as log files, you can do that: watch tail /var/log/messages By default, this...

units of measurement
To measure a quantitative object, we usually use certain standard of units. To measure width or length of a piece of pap...

5 Responses 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.

  2. SUBBAREDDY Says:
    February 14th, 2009 at 1:00 am

    Hi,
    i am working on Solaris9, i want to display the lines satring from 4th line to until last but three lines from the particular line in single shot, example liek i have 10 lines file and i want display from 4th to 7th lines (but number of lines are not pixed in the file-it will be different number-always number records will be different in my file)

    please help me on this, thanks in advance…!:)

    -Subba

  3. SUBBAREDDY Says:
    February 14th, 2009 at 4:26 am

    Hi
    i got it ………!
    n=`wc -l test.txt`
    head -(n-3)test.txt|tail -(n-6) >test_result.txt

    thanks,
    -Subba

  4. Jon Hassall Says:
    June 1st, 2009 at 6:22 am

    A useful tip, thanks!

  5. Music Jobs Says:
    May 5th, 2011 at 12:10 pm

    I really like coming to your site. Thank you for this post, since it has been quite interesting. I have a site where I have several music industry jobs available for searching, and would love to link to your website.

Leave a Reply