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Linux Shell Scripting Essentials
book

Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

by Sinny Kumari
November 2015
Beginner content levelBeginner
282 pages
5h 5m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

Filtering based on lines—head and tail

To display the content of a file, we will use the cat command. The cat command displays the whole file content on stdout. However, sometimes, we are interested in viewing only a few lines of a file. In this case, using cat will be tedious because we will have to scroll down to particular lines that we are interested in.

Shell provides us the head and tail commands to print only the lines in which we are interested in. The main difference between both the commands is, head prints the lines from the beginning of the files, and tail prints the lines from the end of the files.

Printing lines using head

The syntax is as follows:

head [OPTION] [FILE …]

By default, head prints first 10 lines of each FILE to stdout ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781785284441Supplemental Content