Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

Name

head — stdin  stdout  - file  -- opt  --help  --version

Synopsis

head [options] [files]

The head command prints the first 10 lines of a file: great for previewing the contents of a file:

➜ head myfile

or of many files, with a convenient header in front of each:

➜ head * | less      Preview all files in the current directory

or the first few lines of output from a pipeline. Here we use the grep command (see File Text Manipulation), which locates matching lines in a file, to print all lines containing a capital E. by piping the output to head, we display only the first 10 matches:

➜ grep 'E' very-big-file | head

Useful options

-N	Print the first N lines instead of 10.
-n N	Print the first N lines instead of 10.
-c N	Print the first N bytes of the file.