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

When looking into a large file, which consists of thousands of lines, we will not use a command such as cat to print the entire file contents. Instead we look for a sample (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 and even print all the lines except the last n lines or all lines except first n lines.

Another use case is to print lines from mth to nth lines.

The commands head and tail can help us do this.

How to do it...

The head command always reads the header portion of the input file.

1. Print the first 10 lines as follows:

   $ head file
   

2. Read the data from stdin as follows:

   $ cat text | head
   

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

   $ head -n 4 file
   

   This command prints four lines.

4. Print all lines excluding the last M lines as follows:

   $ head -n -M file
   

   Note

   Note that it is negative M.

   For example, to print all the lines except the...