Print a file, skipping the first X lines, in Bash

linux bash printing skip
Eduardo picture Eduardo · Mar 3, 2009 · Viewed 433.6k times · Source

I have a very long file which I want to print, skipping the first 1,000,000 lines, for example.

I looked into the cat man page, but I did not see any option to do this. I am looking for a command to do this or a simple Bash program.

Answer

SingleNegationElimination picture SingleNegationElimination · Mar 3, 2009

You'll need tail. Some examples: 

$ tail great-big-file.log
< Last 10 lines of great-big-file.log >

If you really need to SKIP a particular number of "first" lines, use

$ tail -n +<N+1> <filename>
< filename, excluding first N lines. >

That is, if you want to skip N lines, you start printing line N+1. Example:

$ tail -n +11 /tmp/myfile
< /tmp/myfile, starting at line 11, or skipping the first 10 lines. >

If you want to just see the last so many lines, omit the "+":

$ tail -n <N> <filename>
< last N lines of file. >

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