[Go to CFHT Home Page] Man Pages
Back to Software Index  BORDER=0Manpage Top Level
    HEAD("1") manual page Table of Contents

Name

head - output the first part of files

Synopsis

head [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Description

Print the first 10 lines of each FILE to standard output. With more than one FILE, precede each with a header giving the file name. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

-c, --bytes=[-]N
print the first N bytes of each file; with the leading ‘-’, print all but the last N bytes of each file
-n, --lines=[-]N
print the first N lines instead of the first 10; with the leading ‘-’, print all but the last N lines of each file
-q, --quiet, --silent
never print headers giving file names
-v, --verbose
always print headers giving file names
--help
display this help and exit
--version
output version information and exit

N may have a multiplier suffix: b 512, kB 1000, K 1024, MB 1000*1000, M 1024*1024, GB 1000*1000*1000, G 1024*1024*1024, and so on for T, P, E, Z, Y.

Author

Written by David MacKenzie and Jim Meyering.

Reporting Bugs

Report bugs to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.

Copyright

Copyright © 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html >
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

See Also

The full documentation for head is maintained as a Texinfo manual. If the info and head programs are properly installed at your site, the command
info coreutils ’head invocation’

should give you access to the complete manual.


Table of Contents