Like Tim said, you first have to know how many lines exist in the file before you can do anything other than stream processing. On moderately-sized inputs, "wc -l" works reasonably well. On large inputs, there's no way to do this efficiently unless you're willing to sacrifice accuracy.
F=filename L=$(wc -l $F) head -n $(( $L - num_of_ignored_lines ))
-Adam
On March 4, 2015 2:36:24 PM CST, Kevin McGregor kevin.a.mcgregor@gmail.com wrote:
Can someone help me out? I'm too tired to think straight.
Is there an easy/short way to get all BUT the last n lines of a text file/input? All I can think of is reversing the input line order and tail +n or something like that. FYI the input is not very big.
Kevin
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