How to get only the first ten bytes of a binary file

Question

I am writing a bash script that needs to get the header (first 10 bytes) of a file and then in another section get everything except the first 10 bytes. These are binary files

Answer 1

To get the first 10 bytes, as noted already:

head -c 10

To get all but the first 10 bytes (at least with GNU tail):

tail -c+11

Answer 2

You can use the dd command to copy an arbitrary number of bytes from a binary file.

dd if=infile of=outfile1 bs=10 count=1
dd if=infile of=outfile2 bs=10 skip=1

Answer 3

head -c 10 does the right thing here.