is a program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data.
Syntax The command syntax is:
head [options]
By default, will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output.
Option flags
Other commands Many early versions of Unix and Plan 9 did not have this command, and documentation and books used sed instead:
sed 5q filename
The example prints every line (implicit) and quit after the fifth.
Equivalently, awk may be used to print the first five lines in a file:
awk 'NR < 6' filename
However, neither sed nor awk were available in early versions of BSD, which were based on Version 6 Unix, and included head.
Implementations A head command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.MSX-DOS2 Tools User's Manual by ASCII Corporation The command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.
See also tail (Unix) dd (Unix) List of Unix commands
References
External links
head manual page from GNU coreutils. FreeBSD documentation for head