Get specific line from text file using just shell script

GangstaGraham picture GangstaGraham · Oct 11, 2013 · Viewed 234.2k times · Source

I am trying to get a specific line from a text file.

So far, online I have only seen stuff like sed, (I can only use the sh -not bash or sed or anything like that). I need to do this only using a basic shell script.

cat file | while read line
    do
       #do something
    done

I know how to iterate through lines, as shown above, but what if I just need to get the contents of a particular line

Answer

Kent picture Kent · Oct 11, 2013

sed:

sed '5!d' file

awk:

awk 'NR==5' file