Nifty Unix Tools - head and tail

Head - view the top of files

Head is simple tool to view the top of files. In its simplest form you can use it to see the first ten lines of a file.

head /usr/share/dict/words
A
a
aa
aal
aalii
aam
Aani
aardvark
aardwolf
Aaron

By default it outputs the first ten lines of a file but you can modify that by passing the -n option

head -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words
A

In fact you don't even need to use -n. You can just use a number.

head -1 /usr/share/dict/words
A

This is useful for viewing comments and the the top of files in general but becomes really useful when you pipe things together. 

FILES=/some/dir/*.zip
SEARCH_STRING="findme"

for f in $FILES
do
  zipinfo -1 $f | grep $SEARCH_STRING | head -1 | awk '{ print "Found in: " $1 }'
done

Here we are searching the contents of zip files with a search string but we only want the first occurence. So we can use head to filter the results to just one.

Tail

Tail is the opposite to head but operates on the end of files.

tail /usr/share/dict/words
zymotoxic
zymurgy
Zyrenian
Zyrian
Zyryan
zythem
Zythia
zythum
Zyzomys
Zyzzogeton

It also accepts the -n argument for the number of lines you want

tail -n 1 /usr/share/dict/words
Zyzzogeton

This also works passing just a number

tail -1 /usr/share/dict/words
Zyzzogeton

Watching log files

Tail has the option to watch files in real time so you can keep an eye on log files. You can enable this by passing the -f option.

tail -f /Users/george/Sites/myrailspp/log/development.log

This is really useful for watching logs. You can use it for watching apache, mail logs - any file!

head and tail are simple tools but are extemely useful for everyday usage, especially in piping so worth understanding!

Further reading

Tags

About the author