How do I extract lines from a file using their line number on unix?

unix sed awk line-numbers text-extraction
monkeyking picture monkeyking · Jan 7, 2010 · Viewed 16.9k times · Source

Using sed or similar how would you extract lines from a file? If I wanted lines 1, 5, 1010, 20503 from a file, how would I get these 4 lines?

What if I have a fairly large number of lines I need to extract? If I had a file with 100 lines, each representing a line number that I wanted to extract from another file, how would I do that?

Answer

Steve Emmerson picture Steve Emmerson · Jan 7, 2010

Something like "sed -n '1p;5p;1010p;20503p'. Execute the command "man sed" for details.

For your second question, I'd transform the input file into a bunch of sed(1) commands to print the lines I wanted.

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