How do I read the first line of a file using cat?

Question

How do I read the first line of a file using cat?

Answer 1

You don't need cat.

head -1 file

will work fine.

Answer 2

You could use cat file.txt | head -1, but it would probably be better to use head directly, as in head -1 file.txt.

Answer 3

Use the below command to get the first row from a CSV file or any file formats.

head -1 FileName.csv

Answer 4

cat alone may not be possible, but if you don't want to use head this works:

 cat <file> | awk 'NR == 1'

Answer 5

You don't, use head instead.

head -n 1 file.txt