Get specific line from text file using just shell script

Question

I am trying to get a specific line from a text file.

So far, online I have only seen stuff like sed, (I can only use the sh -not bash or sed or anything like that).

Answer 1

The standard way to do this sort of thing is to use external tools. Disallowing the use of external tools while writing a shell script is absurd. However, if you really don't want to use external tools, you can print line 5 with:

i=0; while read line; do test $((++i)) = 5 && echo "$line"; done < input-file

Note that this will print logical line 5. That is, if input-file contains line continuations, they will be counted as a single line. You can change this behavior by adding -r to the read command. (Which is probably the desired behavior.)