“head” command for aws s3 to view file contents

Question

On Linux, we generally use the head/tail commands to preview the contents of a file. It helps in viewing a part of the file (to inspect the format for instance), rather than ope

Answer 1

You can specify a byte range when retrieving data from S3 to get the first N bytes, the last N bytes or anything in between. (This is also helpful since it allows you to download files in parallel – just start multiple threads or processes, each of which retrieves part of the total file.)

I don't know which of the various CLI tools support this directly but a range retrieval does what you want.

The AWS CLI tools ("aws s3 cp" to be precise) does not allow you to do range retrieval but s3curl (http://aws.amazon.com/code/128) should do the trick.(So does plain curl, e.g., using the --range parameter but then you would have to do the request signing on your own.)