Fastest way to print a single line in a file

Question

I have to fetch one specific line out of a big file (1500000 lines), multiple times in a loop over multiple files, I was asking my self what would be the best option

Answer 1

If you want to print only 1 line (say the 20th one) from a large file you could also do:

head -20 filename | tail -1

I did a "basic" test with bash and it seems to perform better than the sed -n '1{p;q} solution above.

Test takes a large file and prints a line from somewhere in the middle (at line 10000000), repeats 100 times, each time selecting the next line. So it selects line 10000000,10000001,10000002, ... and so on till 10000099

$wc -l english
36374448 english

$time for i in {0..99}; do j=$((i+10000000));  sed -n $j'{p;q}' english >/dev/null; done;

real    1m27.207s
user    1m20.712s
sys     0m6.284s

vs.

$time for i in {0..99}; do j=$((i+10000000));  head -$j english | tail -1 >/dev/null; done;

real    1m3.796s
user    0m59.356s
sys     0m32.376s

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For printing a line out of multiple files

$wc -l english*
  36374448 english
  17797377 english.1024MB
   3461885 english.200MB
  57633710 total

$time for i in english*; do sed -n '10000000{p;q}' $i >/dev/null; done; 

real    0m2.059s
user    0m1.904s
sys     0m0.144s



$time for i in english*; do head -10000000 $i | tail -1 >/dev/null; done;

real    0m1.535s
user    0m1.420s
sys     0m0.788s