Command to get nth line of STDOUT

Question

Is there any bash command that will let you get the nth line of STDOUT?

That is to say, something that would take this

$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root  wh         


        

Answer 1

You can use awk:

ls -l | awk 'NR==2'

Update

The above code will not get what we want because of off-by-one error: the ls -l command's first line is the total line. For that, the following revised code will work:

ls -l | awk 'NR==3'

Answer 2

Try this sed version:

ls -l | sed '2 ! d'

It says "delete all the lines that aren't the second one".

Answer 3

From sed1line:

# print line number 52
sed -n '52p'                 # method 1
sed '52!d'                   # method 2
sed '52q;d'                  # method 3, efficient on large files

From awk1line:

# print line number 52
awk 'NR==52'
awk 'NR==52 {print;exit}'          # more efficient on large files

Answer 4

Yes, the most efficient way (as already pointed out by Jonathan Leffler) is to use sed with print & quit:

set -o pipefail                        # cf. help set
time -p ls -l | sed -n -e '2{p;q;}'    # only print the second line & quit (on Mac OS X)
echo "$?: ${PIPESTATUS[*]}"            # cf. man bash | less -p 'PIPESTATUS'

Answer 5

For more completeness..

ls -l | (for ((x=0;x<2;x++)) ; do read ; done ; head -n1)

Throw away lines until you get to the second, then print out the first line after that. So, it prints the 3rd line.

If it's just the second line..

ls -l | (read; head -n1)

Put as many 'read's as necessary.

Answer 6

For the sake of completeness ;-)

shorter code

find / | awk NR==3

shorter life

find / | awk 'NR==3 {print $0; exit}'