head (Unix)

head is a program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data.

Syntax

The command syntax is:

head [options] <file_name> 

By default, head will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output. The number of lines printed may be changed with a command line option. The following example shows the first 20 lines of filename:

head -n 20 filename 

This displays the first 5 lines of all files starting with foo:

head -n 5 foo* 

Most versions allow omitting n and instead directly specifying the number: -5. GNU head allows negative arguments for the -n option, meaning to print all but the last - argument value counted - lines of each input file.

Flags

-c <x number of bytes> Copy first x number of bytes. 

Other

Many early versions of Unix did not have this command, and documentation and books used sed instead:

sed 5q filename 

The example prints every line (implicit) and quit after the fifth.

Implementations

A head command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.^[1] The head command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.^[2]

See also

• tail (Unix)
• dd (Unix)
• List of Unix commands

References

External links

• head manual page from GNU coreutils.
• FreeBSD documentation for head