“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 use the range switch to the older s3api get-object command to bring back the first bytes of a s3 object. (AFAICT s3 doesn't support the switch.)

The pipe \dev\stdout can be passed as the target filename if you simply want to view the S3 object by piping to head. Here's an example:

aws s3api get-object --bucket mybucket_name --key path/to/the/file.log --range bytes=0-10000 /dev/stdout | head

Finally, if like me you're dealing with compressed .gz files, the above technique also works with zless enabling you to view the head of the decompressed file:

aws s3api get-object --bucket mybucket_name --key path/to/the/file.log.gz --range bytes=0-10000 /dev/stdout | zless

One tip with zless: if it isn't working try increasing the size of the range.