Is there a \"canonical\" way of doing that? I\'ve been using head -n | tail -1
which does the trick, but I\'ve been wondering if there\'s a Bash tool that speci
head
and pipe with tail
will be slow for a huge file. I would suggest sed
like this:
sed 'NUMq;d' file
Where NUM
is the number of the line you want to print; so, for example, sed '10q;d' file
to print the 10th line of file
.
Explanation:
NUMq
will quit immediately when the line number is NUM
.
d
will delete the line instead of printing it; this is inhibited on the last line because the q
causes the rest of the script to be skipped when quitting.
If you have NUM
in a variable, you will want to use double quotes instead of single:
sed "${NUM}q;d" file