How to get the last lines of a file except the first 20?

Question

Say I have a file with any number of lines, say, 125. I want to get all the lines except the first n, say, 20. So, I want lines 21–125.

Is there a way to do this with with tail/head, or some other tool?

If you want to know what head/tail can do, read the man pages for them. If you did not know that head/tail existed, I could understand why you'd ask the question, but explicitly asking about head/tail deserves a RTFM response. — camh, Nov 29 '08 at 01:39
Linked: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/604864/print-a-file-skipping-x-lines-in-bash — Prof. Falken, Jan 16 '13 at 09:09

score 34 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:50

34

Try

tail -n +21 myfile.txt

answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:50

unwind

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:55

5

Try

sed -i 1,20d filename

if you want to delete the first 20 lines !

answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:55

Vijay Dev

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:53

3

Awk power can be used too:

awk -- 'NR > 20' /etc/passwd

answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:53

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:53

3

I'm rusty with this but something like: tail -n +20 filename

answered Nov 24 '08 at 14:53

Rotem

4 Answers4