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Accepted
David Oneill
Asked: 2011-03-05 14:15:58 +0800 CST

Display the first few lines of a file

  • 772

I have a folder with quite a few files in it. I want to display the following:

filename_1
first line of file1
second line of file1
third line of file1
filename_2
first line of file2
second line of file2
third line of file2
filename_3
first line of file3
second line of file3
third line of file3

etc. How can I do that?

command-line

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You use the head command to do this, with the -n argument with the number of lines from each file, like this:

    head -n3 *

    or

    head -n3 *.txt

    This also works for a single file:

    head -n3 filename.txt
    • 70

  2. head

    You use head with the -n option.

    head -n 10 FILE

    This will print the first ten lines of a file.

    Another useful variation would be -n -NUMBER.

    head -n -10 FILE

    This will print all but the last ten lines of a file.

    To solve your problem and get your desired output you can do the following.

    basename * && head -n NUMBER *

    or

    basename *.FILETYPE && head -n NUMBER *.FILETYPE

    This will get you following output:

    FILENAME
LINE ONE
LINE TWO
LINE THREE
    • 13

  3. This will do what you want, hopefuly:

    find . -print -exec head {} -n 3 \;

    -print will show the filename and the rest (from -exec) will show the first 3 lines of each file

    Change the number according to your needs...

    • 4

  4. To add the filename to the head output use 'head -v'. So 'head -vn 3 *.html' gives me:

    # head -vn 3 *.html
==> WebInfo.html <==
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>

==> convert.html <==
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>

==> misc.html <==
<html>
<head>
<title>WIP</title>
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