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head
Example usage ofhead command to display first 5 lines ofLorem ipsum in the specified file
Developers	Variousopen-source andcommercial developers
Operating system	Unix,Unix-like,MSX-DOS,IBM i
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command
License	coreutils:GPLv3

head is aprogram onUnix andUnix-likeoperating systems used to display the beginning of a textfile orpiped data.

The commandsyntax is:

head [options]⟨file_name⟩

By default,head will print the first 10 lines of its input to thestandard output.

-n⟨count⟩

--lines=⟨count⟩

The number of lines printed may be changed with acommand line option. The following example shows the first 20 lines offilename:

head -n 20filename

This displays the first 5 lines of all files starting withfoo:

head -n 5foo*

Most versions^{[citation needed]} allow omittingn and instead directly specifying the number:-5.GNU head allows negative arguments for the-n option, meaning to print all but the last - argument value counted - lines of each input file.

-c⟨bytes⟩

--bytes=⟨bytes⟩

Print first x number of bytes.

Many early versions of Unix and Plan 9 did not have this command, and documentation and books usedsed instead:

sed 5qfilename

The example prints every line (implicit) and quit after the fifth.

Equivalently,awk may be used to print the first five lines in a file:

awk 'NR < 6'filename

However, neither sed nor awk were available in early versions ofBSD, which were based onVersion 6 Unix, and included head.^[1]

Ahead command is also part ofASCII'sMSX-DOS2 Tools forMSX-DOS version 2.^[2] Thehead command has also been ported to theIBM i operating system.^[3]

• tail (Unix)
• dd (Unix)
• List of Unix commands

The WikibookGuide to Unix has a page on the topic of:Commands

• head manual page fromGNUcoreutils.
• FreeBSD documentation for head

• Unix text processing utilities
• Unix SUS2008 utilities
• IBM i Qshell commands

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