bash Cookbook

Skipping a Header in a File

Problem

You have a file with one or more header lines and you need to process just the data, and skip the header.

Solution

Use the tail command with a special argument. For example, to skip the first line of a file:

$ tail -n +2 lines
Line 2

Line 4
Line 5

Discussion

An argument to tail, which is a number starting dash (-), will specify a line offset relative to the end of the file. So tail -n 10 file shows the last 10 lines of file, which also happens to be the default if you don’t specify anything. But a number starting with a plus (+) sign is an offset relative to the top of the file. Thus, tail+1 file gives you the entire file, the same as cat. +2 skips the first line, and so on.

See Also

• man tail

• Setting Up a Database with MySQL