Printing a sample from a huge file

Question

I have a rather large text corpus, of which I would like to check a few lines to see if the format is correct (and to just generally get some idea of its contents). Is there a simple one-liner that can be used to print just the first few lines of a huge text file?

Personally I'm using PowerShell, but answers are appreciated for bash and several other shells.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:36

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In powershell

get-content c:\filename.txt -TotalCount 3 #here just the first 3 line.

answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:36

CB.

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I believe that if the file is big it will take time to produce results this way [`as question says its a large text corpus`]? – Angshuman Agarwal Jun 21 '12 at 16:25
@AngshumanAgarwal Tested with a 100MB file not seem to be slow. Don't know with a 1GB file. – CB. Jun 21 '12 at 16:59

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:32

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The n first lines

head -n filename

The n first bytes

dd if=filename bs=1 count=n

answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:32

Nahuel Fouilleul

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score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

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$ head yourfile.txt

I'm certain there's an equivalent in PowerShell. I mean, there must be, right?

Edit: Yep. Windows equivalent of the 'tail' command

edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

Community

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answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:32

Jordan Running

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I believe `head` is actually a part of unxutils, so it works here. Thanks! :) – wen Jun 21 '12 at 15:34

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:44

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You can use less. It's very efficient with large files. And, if you need to see more* you can continue paging through the file.

_{*"less is more"}

answered Jun 21 '12 at 15:44

Dennis Williamson

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Printing a sample from a huge file

4 Answers4