Head (Unix)


head is a program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data.

Syntax

The command syntax is:
head <file_name>
By default, head will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output. The number of lines printed may be changed with a command line option. The following example shows the first 20 lines of filename:
head -n 20 filename
This displays the first 5 lines of all files starting with foo:
head -n 5 foo*
Most versions allow omitting n 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.

Flags

-c Copy first x number of bytes.

Other

Many early versions of Unix did not have this command, and documentation and books used sed instead:
sed 5q filename
The example prints every line and quit after the fifth.

Implementations

A head command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.