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

I've put some of the above answers into a short bash script that you can put into a file called get.sh and link to /usr/local/bin/get (or whatever other name you prefer).

#!/bin/bash
if [ "${1}" == "" ]; then
    echo "error: blank line number";
    exit 1
fi
re='^[0-9]+$'
if ! [[ $1 =~ $re ]] ; then
    echo "error: line number arg not a number";
    exit 1
fi
if [ "${2}" == "" ]; then
    echo "error: blank file name";
    exit 1
fi
sed "${1}q;d" $2;
exit 0

Ensure it's executable with

$ chmod +x get

Link it to make it available on the PATH with

$ ln -s get.sh /usr/local/bin/get

Enjoy responsibly!

P