head tail

In class, someone asked me how to extract the second row of a file. I said that a Python script would be the simplest way. How wrong I was! I can't believe I missed it, given the topic of yesterday's lecture, but there is a very simple way to do this using head, tail, and a pipe |.

Suppose data.csv looks like:

name,score
ian,100000
daniel,1
mike-tyson,10

Then head works like:

$ head -n 3 data.csv
name,score
ian,100000
daniel,1

In other words, if you give it the option -n3 then it returns the first three lines of the file. tail works like head, but gives the last n lines. Now...try using a pipe to tie them together and demonstrate how to extract the second line. Post your answer as a comment on this site.

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Tags

• tutorial 8
• unix 1