[RLUG] Re: quick question

[Grant Kelly]

Very true, and a arguably more intuitive solution than using sed.

The man page for tail in Linux hardly mentions using '+'. It's not
even shown in the SYNOPSIS; it's snuck into a descriptive paragraph
after the list of options.

On Solaris, '+' is actualy shown in the first line of the SYNOPSIS.
Much more visible.

Thanks for pointing this out (again). It will be useful to others in
the future.

Grant

On 6/30/06, Jeff Shippen <jeffshippen at bluebottle.com> wrote:
>
>  heh, you guys are acting like you never got the e-mail i sent days ago
> regarding the tail command.
>
>  tail +301 bigfile will start at line 301 and display till the end, you can
> then use redirection to put it in a new file.  So you don't have to know the
> total number of lines, just the number of lines in the beginning that you
> want to get rid of, which you mentioned already was 300.
>  Jeff
>
>
>  Grant Kelly wrote:
> I did play with the tail command, but as mentioned, you still have to
>  know the total number of lines in the file. `wc -l` took about 5
>  minutes to calculate this number, and then you've still got to run it
>  through tail.
>
>  Also, I wanted to remove the lines rather than ignore them so that, if
>  needed, I could reuse the file or pass it on to others without them
>  having to go through the same problem I did.
>  Furthermore, the CREATE TABLE commands were preceeded by something
>  like IF EXISTS DROP table.  I had already created the tables and
>  changed them slightly, so I didn't want them re-created.  sed was the
>  quickest and simplest tool for the job in this case.
>
>  So much for a "quick question".... over 30 messages in this thread!
>
>  Grant
>
>
>  On 6/30/06, James Washer <washer at trlp.com> wrote:
>
> Jeezus...
>
>  YES... the tail command gives the last "xx" lines of the files.. but
> without counting the lines of the 2+GB file, one has no idea how many lines
> that is. Counting the lines of an arbitrarily large file, when there is no
> need to do so, is far from efficient.
>
>  Further try "cat < head -3 /etc/passwd" and report back on the shell error
> you receive. That's just not legal shell syntax.
>
>
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