Linux command (like cat) to read a specified quantity of characters

Question

Is there a command like cat in linux which can return a specified quantity of characters from a file?

e.g., I have a text file like:

Hel         


        

Answer 1

head:

Name

head - output the first part of files

Synopsis

head [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Description

Print the first 10 lines of each FILE to standard output. With more than one FILE, precede each with a header giving the file name. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
-c, --bytes=[-]N print the first N bytes of each file; with the leading '-', print all but the last N bytes of each file

Answer 2

head works too:

head -c 100 file  # returns the first 100 bytes in the file

..will extract the first 100 bytes and return them.

What's nice about using head for this is that the syntax for tail matches:

tail -c 100 file  # returns the last 100 bytes in the file

You can combine these to get ranges of bytes. For example, to get the second 100 bytes from a file, read the first 200 with head and use tail to get the last 100:

head -c 200 file | tail -c 100

Answer 3

You can use dd to extract arbitrary chunks of bytes.

For example,

dd skip=1234 count=5 bs=1

would copy bytes 1235 to 1239 from its input to its output, and discard the rest.

To just get the first five bytes from standard input, do:

dd count=5 bs=1

Note that, if you want to specify the input file name, dd has old-fashioned argument parsing, so you would do:

dd count=5 bs=1 if=filename

Note also that dd verbosely announces what it did, so to toss that away, do:

dd count=5 bs=1 2>&-

or

dd count=5 bs=1 2>/dev/null

Answer 4

head -Line_number file_name | tail -1 |cut -c Num_of_chars

this script gives the exact number of characters from the specific line and location, e.g.:

head -5 tst.txt | tail -1 |cut -c 5-8

gives the chars in line 5 and chars 5 to 8 of line 5,

Note: tail -1 is used to select the last line displayed by the head.

Answer 5

head or tail can do it as well:

head -c X

Prints the first X bytes (not necessarily characters if it's a UTF-16 file) of the file. tail will do the same, except for the last X bytes.

This (and cut) are portable.

Answer 6

I know the answer is in reply to a question asked 6 years ago ...

But I was looking for something similar for a few hours and then found out that: cut -c does exactly that, with an added bonus that you could also specify an offset.

cut -c 1-5 will return Hello and cut -c 7-11 will return world. No need for any other command