How do i extract the text present in the 7th line of a file

Question

How do i extract the text present in the 7th line of a file using shell script For eg., I have sumthing like,

abc
def
ghi
jkl
mno
pqr
stu

I need to print the text stu.

Can sumbdy help on this. Pls...

possible duplicate of [print every nth line into a row using gawk](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9968916/print-every-nth-line-into-a-row-using-gawk) — l0b0, Jun 25 '13 at 12:53
possible duplicate of [bash tool to get nth line from a file](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6022384/bash-tool-to-get-nth-line-from-a-file) — doubleDown, Jun 25 '13 at 22:49

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

3

You can make it with awk:

awk 'NR==7' file

as NR refers to number of line.

Also in sed:

sed -n '7p' file

Update And even better (thanks pixelbeat)

sed -n '7{p;q}' file

Test to see how better is the second option:

Let's fill a file with 1,000,000 lines:

$ for i in {1..1000000}; do echo $i>>a; done

Now let's compare the time used by each sed:

$ time sed -n '3p' a
3

real    0m0.098s
user    0m0.084s
sys     0m0.008s
$ time sed -n '3{p;q}' a
3

real    0m0.012s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.008s

Which is 8 times faster!

$ echo "0.098 / 0.012" | bc
8

edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

Community

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answered Jun 25 '13 at 12:09

fedorqui

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For sed I'd also get it to exit early, like: sed -n '7{p;q}' – pixelbeat Aug 06 '13 at 23:55
Oh, that's a good improvement, @pixelbeat. I just updated my answer with a study of the performance of each command. Yours is way better! – fedorqui Aug 07 '13 at 08:07

Kyle Burton · Answer 2 · 2013-06-25T22:42:00.383

0

In addition to awk, there are many other utilities that can be composed to do this. Here are a few more:

head and tail

head -n 7 file | tail -n 1

perl

perl -ne 'print if $.==7' file

ruby is actually identical to the perl

ruby -ne 'print if $.==7' file

There is probably a shorter way, here it is in python:

python -c "import sys; x=[l for l in sys.stdin]; sys.stdout.write(x[6])" < x

edited Jun 25 '13 at 22:42

answered Jun 25 '13 at 12:12

Kyle Burton

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You missed `java` and `php` :) I think it is quite useful to have such broad options, although having tag:shell i don't think it is that necessary. – fedorqui Jun 25 '13 at 12:16
Java isn't very good at shell scripting (certainly not these kinds of 1-liners). PHP isn't installed on my systems and I don't have much experience using it. These are the things I typically use from my shell scripts. Just offering options. :) Regards – Kyle Burton Jun 25 '13 at 12:20

How do i extract the text present in the 7th line of a file

2 Answers2

Test to see how better is the second option: