Can I grep only the first n lines of a file?

Question

I have very long log files, is it possible to ask grep to only search the first 10 lines?

Answer 1

An extension to Joachim Isaksson's answer: Quite often I need something from the middle of a long file, e.g. lines 5001 to 5020, in which case you can combine head with tail:

head -5020 file.txt | tail -20 | grep x

This gets the first 5020 lines, then shows only the last 20 of those, then pipes everything to grep.

(Edited: fencepost error in my example numbers, added pipe to grep)