On Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:34:50 -0700 (PDT) Forest Oakwater <[email protected]> wrote:
> Paul, > > Thank you for the information. Would you consider updating the builtin > documentation and man page to match the behavior of the program? It *is* correct. Nowhere it says that you can use "tail -2" or "tail +2". Instead it says that you should use "tail -n N", or "tail --lines=N" (or +N if you want from line N). > Also, do you know of an efficient POSIX way to filter out the first N > lines of a text file? > > # inefficient? > head -N datafile > datafile.head > diff datafile.head datafile |grep '^>' |cut -c3- > datafile.new > mv datafile.new datafile Dozens, all probably just as efficient as using tail -n +N. -- D.
