How to apply inverse of head/tail

B-Con · 2008-12-01 02:09:21

It seems as if I find myself wanting to extract the inverted selection of head or tail almost as often as I do the normal selection. Ie, I want to filter *out* the first or last n lines of some standard input. Is there a simple way to do this, aside from writing a short script to get the line count, then head/tailing off the complement of what I want? I wish head and tail had the grep equivalent of -v.

rson451 · 2008-12-01 02:17:39

From what I understand, the inverse of

head -n 25 file

would be

tail -n +25 file

and the inverse of

tail -n 25 file

would be

head -n -25 file

Is this what you want?

Daenyth · 2008-12-01 03:01:30

You can print address ranges with sed too.

# Print lines 10-20
sed -n '10,20p' filename

Might also want to look at «tac».

B-Con · 2008-12-01 04:51:53

Thanks, rson. I was looking at the man pages and thought there was something along those lines syntax-wise, but I couldn't get it to work. Apparently I was misreading something. Thanks.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-01 02:09:21

How to apply inverse of head/tail

#2 2008-12-01 02:17:39

Re: How to apply inverse of head/tail

#3 2008-12-01 03:01:30

Re: How to apply inverse of head/tail

#4 2008-12-01 04:51:53

Re: How to apply inverse of head/tail

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