How to use sed to remove the last n lines of a file

Question

I want to remove some n lines from the end of a file. Can this be done using sed?

For example, to remove lines from 2 to 4, I can use

$ sed          


        

Answer 1

You could use head for this.

Use

$ head --lines=-N file > new_file

where N is the number of lines you want to remove from the file.

The contents of the original file minus the last N lines are now in new_file