Head (Unix)

head is a program on Unix and Unix-like systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data. The command syntax is:

By default, head will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output. The number of lines printed may be changed with a command line option. The following example shows the first 20 lines of filename:

This displays the first 5 lines of all files starting with foo:

Most versions allow omitting the n and just let you say -5. GNU head allows negative arguments for -n option, meaning to print all but the last - argument value counted - lines of each input file.

Many early versions of Unix did not have this command, and so documentation and books had sed do this job:

This says to print every line (implicit), and quit after the fifth.

If you want to do the reverse of what head does. For example: not display the first 5 lines of a file, this would do the job

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