Printing a range of lines

Problem

You want to print a range of lines from a file or from stdin, not the whole thing. For instance, you may want to print only the first 3 lines, or the last 5 lines, or everything except the first line, or everything except the last 2 lines.

Solution

First, we can count the number of lines in a file like this

    wc -l <file>
    cat <file> | wc -l

Print the first n line with head

    head -n 10 <file>

Print last n line with tail

    tail -n 10 <file>

Print everything except the first n line with tail

    tail -n +7 <file>

Print everything except the last n line with head

    head -n -2 <file>

Print from line x to line y with sed

    sed -n "1,3p" <file>