head is a program on Unix and Unix-like systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data. The command syntax is:
Contents
head [options] <file_name>By default, head will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output. The number of lines printed may be changed with a command line option. The following example shows the first 20 lines of filename:
head -n 20 filenameThis displays the first 5 lines of all files starting with foo:
head -n 5 foo*Most versions allow omitting the n and just let you say -5. GNU head allows negative arguments for -n option, meaning to print all but the last - argument value counted - lines of each input file.
Flags
-c <x number of bytes> Copy first x number of bytes.Other
Many early versions of Unix did not have this command, and so documentation and books had sed do this job:
sed 5q fooThis says to print every line (implicit), and quit after the fifth.
If you want to do the reverse of what head does. For example: not display the first 5 lines of a file, this would do the job
sed -n '1,5!p' filename