Command to get nth line of STDOUT

Using sed, just for variety:

ls -l | sed -n 2p

Using this alternative, which looks more efficient since it stops reading the input when the required line is printed, may generate a SIGPIPE in the feeding process, which may in turn generate an unwanted error message:

ls -l | sed -n -e '2{p;q}'

I've seen that often enough that I usually use the first (which is easier to type, anyway), though ls is not a command that complains when it gets SIGPIPE.

For a range of lines:

ls -l | sed -n 2,4p

For several ranges of lines:

ls -l | sed -n -e 2,4p -e 20,30p
ls -l | sed -n -e '2,4p;20,30p'

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ls -l | head -2 | tail -1

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Alternative to the nice head / tail way:

ls -al | awk 'NR==2'

or

ls -al | sed -n '2p'

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From sed1line:

# print line number 52
sed -n '52p'                 # method 1
sed '52!d'                   # method 2
sed '52q;d'                  # method 3, efficient on large files

From awk1line:

# print line number 52
awk 'NR==52'
awk 'NR==52 {print;exit}'          # more efficient on large files

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For the sake of completeness ;-)

shorter code

find / | awk NR==3

shorter life

find / | awk 'NR==3 {print $0; exit}'

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Try this sed version:

ls -l | sed '2 ! d'

It says "delete all the lines that aren't the second one".

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You can use awk:

ls -l | awk 'NR==2'

Update

The above code will not get what we want because of off-by-one error: the ls -l command's first line is the total line. For that, the following revised code will work:

ls -l | awk 'NR==3'

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Is Perl easily available to you?

$ perl -n -e 'if ($. == 7) { print; exit(0); }'

Obviously substitute whatever number you want for 7.

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Another poster suggested

ls -l | head -2 | tail -1

but if you pipe head into tail, it looks like everything up to line N is processed twice.

Piping tail into head

ls -l | tail -n +2 | head -n1

would be more efficient?

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Yes, the most efficient way (as already pointed out by Jonathan Leffler) is to use sed with print & quit:

set -o pipefail                        # cf. help set
time -p ls -l | sed -n -e '2{p;q;}'    # only print the second line & quit (on Mac OS X)
echo "$?: ${PIPESTATUS[*]}"            # cf. man bash | less -p 'PIPESTATUS'

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Hmm

sed did not work in my case. I propose:

for "odd" lines 1,3,5,7... ls |awk '0 == (NR+1) % 2' for "even" lines 2,4,6,8 ls |awk '0 == (NR) % 2'

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For more completeness..

ls -l | (for ((x=0;x<2;x++)) ; do read ; done ; head -n1)

Throw away lines until you get to the second, then print out the first line after that. So, it prints the 3rd line.

If it's just the second line..

ls -l | (read; head -n1)

Put as many 'read's as necessary.

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