Unix head command

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The external head command displays the first few lines of a file. The head command is useful for verifying what type of data is in a file. It can be used to view the first few lines of an ASCII file to visually decide what data is contained in the file. You might consider head as a special version of the cat command, allowing you to view the beginning portion of the file.

It is often used in Web log analystes based on pipes.

It displays however many lines you specify as an option. If you do not specify the number of lines to display, head defaults to ten. Its cousin is the tail command.

     head [ -n ] file

here n is the number of lines to display starting from the beginning of each file.

If more than one file is specified on the command line, head precedes each file with a line like:

     ===> filename <===

If only one file is given on the command line, head does not inform you of the filename being displayed

If you want the name of the file displayed despite the fact that its the only one you can use /devnull as the second file or the first file

head -10 file /dev/null

You may choose to use head to display the entire contents of multiple short files so each file will be preceded by its filename. In this case you need to specify n large enough. The following command provides an example:

head -99999 file1 file2 file3

Old News ;-)

Unix Tools for Web log Analysis

% sort -t" " -k 3 a.txt | head -1

TTTT head and tail

Sometimes you don't want to look at a whole file or all the output from a command, but just the first or last few lines of it.
head and tail provide a means to this end. Unfortunately, they seem to have been written by different people with different ideas about what would be useful, so they work a little differently.

head
head is used to show the first few lines of a file or stream. By default it shows 10 lines:
% ypcat passwd | head
bsmith:*:1243:317:Bob Smith:/home/baker-a/bsmith:/bin/csh
wayne:*:182:60:Wayne Simpson:/home/wayne:/bin/csh
walker:*:1791:100:Lisa Walker:/home/dogbert-a/walker:/bin/csh 
jim:*:1644:100:Jim Smith:/home/dogbert-a/jim:/bin/csh
paul:*:1724:135:Paul Jones:/home/dilbert-a/paul:/bin/csh 
harry:*:1611:100:Harry Palmer:/home/pkduck-f/harry:/bin/csh
alex:*:1959:100:Alex Watson:/home/alex:/bin/csh 
sue:*:1988:100:Sue Foo:/home/sue:/bin/csh
marty:*:1318:78:Marty Taylor:/home/manfac-a/home/marty:/bin/csh
You can specify a different number of lines by prefacing the number with a hyphen ("-"):
% ypcat passwd | head -2
bsmith:*:1243:317:Bob Smith:/home/baker-a/bsmith:/bin/csh
wayne:*:182:60:Wayne Simpson:/home/wayne:/bin/csh
If you specify more than one filename on the commandline, head will show the first few lines of each file with a one-line banner identifying each file:
% head -2 /usr/man/man1/head.1 /usr/man/man1/tail.1
==> /usr/man/man1/head.1 <==
.\" @(#)head.1 1.17 90/02/15 SMI; from UCB 4.1
.TH HEAD 1 "9 September 1987"

==> /usr/man/man1/tail.1 <==
.\" @(#)tail.1 1.14 90/02/15 SMI; from S5R2 6.2 83/09/02
.TH TAIL 1 "14 August 1989"

Recommended Links

Unix head command

head (Unix) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

TTTT head and tail

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Last modified: March 15, 2008