Bash tool to get nth line from a file

Question

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

Answer 1

Lots of good answers already. I personally go with awk. For convenience, if you use bash, just add the below to your ~/.bash_profile. And, the next time you log in (or if you source your .bash_profile after this update), you will have a new nifty "nth" function available to pipe your files through.

Execute this or put it in your ~/.bash_profile (if using bash) and reopen bash (or execute source ~/.bach_profile)

# print just the nth piped in line
nth () { awk -vlnum=${1} 'NR==lnum {print; exit}'; } 

Then, to use it, simply pipe through it. E.g.,:

$ yes line | cat -n | nth 5
     5  line