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
Roundtable mailing list
Roundtable@muug.mb.ca
http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.