Size: 1070
Comment: make cut work (with tabs in the file cut -f2 would only give part of the desired output) -- shouldn't this example be removed?! -- so much prettier in sed/awk.
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Size: 942
Comment: Yes, remove the cut example, especially if people are going to use --gnu-only-long-options in their examples. :-/
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Using nl(1) (and grep(1) (and cut(1))): {{{ nl -b a file | grep '^ *<number of line>\W' | cut -f 1 --complement }}} |
How can I print the n'th line of a file?
The dirty (but not quick) way would be:
sed -n ${n}p "$file"
but this reads the whole input file, even if you only wanted the third line.
This one avoids that problem:
sed -n "$n{p;q;}" "$file"
At line $n the command "p" is run, printing it, with a "q" afterwards: quit the program.
Another way, more obvious to some, is to grab the last line from a listing of the first n lines:
head -n $n $file | tail -n 1
Another approach, using ["AWK"]:
awk "NR==$n{print;exit}" file
If you want more than one line, it's pretty easy to adapt any of the previous methods:
x=3 y=4; sed -n "$x,${y}p;${y}q;" "$file" # Print lines $x to $y; quit after $y. head -n $y "$file" | tail -n $(($y - $x + 1)) # Same awk "NR>=$x{print} NR==$y{exit}" "$file" # Same