Bash tool to get nth line from a file

Question

Is there a \"canonical\" way of doing that? I\'ve been using head -n | tail -1 which does the trick, but I\'ve been wondering if there\'s a Bash tool that speci

Answer 1

The fastest solution for big files is always tail|head, provided that the two distances:

• from the start of the file to the starting line. Lets call it S
• the distance from the last line to the end of the file. Be it E

are known. Then, we could use this:

mycount="$E"; (( E > S )) && mycount="+$S"
howmany="$(( endline - startline + 1 ))"
tail -n "$mycount"| head -n "$howmany"

howmany is just the count of lines required.

Some more detail in https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/216614/79743