unix - head AND tail of file

Question

Say you have a txt file, what is the command to view the top 10 lines and bottom 10 lines of file simultaneously?

i.e. if the file is 200 lines long, then view lines

Answer 1

I would say that depending upon the size of the file, actively reading in its contents may not be desirable. In that circumstance, I think some simple shell scripting should suffice.

Here's how I recently handled this for a number of very large CSV files that I was analyzing:

$ for file in *.csv; do echo "### ${file}" && head ${file} && echo ... && tail ${file} && echo; done

This prints out the first 10 lines and the last 10 lines of each file, while also printing out the filename and some ellipsis before and after.

For a single large file, you could simply run the following for the same effect:

$ head somefile.csv && echo ... && tail somefile.csv