How to get the first line of a file in a bash script?

Question

I have to put in a bash variable the first line of a file. I guess it is with the grep command, but it is any way to restrict the number of lines?

Answer 1

This suffices and stores the first line of filename in the variable $line:

read -r line < filename

I also like awk for this:

awk 'NR==1 {print; exit}' file

To store the line itself, use the var=$(command) syntax. In this case, line=$(awk 'NR==1 {print; exit}' file).

Or even sed:

sed -n '1p' file

With the equivalent line=$(sed -n '1p' file).

---

See a sample when we feed the read with seq 10, that is, a sequence of numbers from 1 to 10:

$ read -r line < <(seq 10) 
$ echo "$line"
1

$ line=$(awk 'NR==1 {print; exit}' <(seq 10))
$ echo "$line"
1