Using head and tail for printing the last or first 10 lines

When examining a large file, thousands of lines long, the cat command, which will display all the line,s is not suitable. Instead, we want to view a subset (for example, the first 10 lines of the file or the last 10 lines of the file). We may need to print the first n lines or last n lines or print all except the last n lines or all except the first n lines, or the lines between two locations.

The head and tail commands can do this.

How to do it...

The head command reads the beginning of the input file.

1. Print the first 10 lines:

$ head file

 

 

2. Read the data from stdin:

$ cat text | head

3. Specify the number of first lines to be printed:

$ head -n 4 file

This command prints the first four lines.

4. Print all lines excluding the last M lines:

$ head -n -M file

Note

Note that it is negative M.

 For example, to print all the lines except the last five lines, use the following command line:

$ seq 11 | head -n -5
        1
        2
        3
        4
 ...