Easiest way to display a range of lines in a huge text file? Don’t need to edit

Question

IN order to display from line 1 million, for 20 lines, I ended up with

head -1000020 myfile | tail - 20

That works and I’ve wrapped in a function that does arithmetic for it. But I was wondering if there’s an existing bash or unix command for it.

Am on macOs, but happy knowing Linux for it too.

No, there's nothing built-in that does this. You can use `sed -n '1000001,1000020p' filename` — Barmar, Sep 12 '19 at 21:24
No worries, it's now a pointer for others finding this question first. — Benjamin W., Sep 12 '19 at 21:42

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 12 '19 at 21:29

1

awk to the rescue!

$ awk -v n=1000000 'NR>n; NR==n+20{exit}' file

will exit early, useful if your file is very large.

answered Sep 12 '19 at 21:29

karakfa

this is a duplicate question but this answer doesn't exist on the linked one. – karakfa Sep 13 '19 at 01:20

1 Answers1