Get rid of the first line of an output file

[Simeon Harwood]

Morning all,
I've found an anoying problem with "tail".
I've got an output file that is more that 5000 lines long. This needs to be cleaned up to be used as a load for a database. I can clean up all the file as needed, but I need to get rid of the header info. Usually, I would do a
"wc -l" on the file, do a sum to take off say 1 or 2 lines, then do a "tail -n " on the file to get rid of it.
BUT "tail" seems to have a limit on it, and so dosen't report the whole file back to me.
Does anyone have a little trick up their sleeve to get round this please.

Thanks,
Sime.

[Gavin Clarke · Accepted solution]

Well you could use split then cat.

split -n 10000 filename
tail -9999 xxa > trimmedfile
cat trimmedfile xxb xxc xxd > filename

Or something like that, you may have to tailor it so that tail can cope.

Probably not the best solution, it's a thought though.

[Simeon Harwood]

Just realised that I can use: -
sed '1d'

I guess I need to wake up a bit......

[Orhan Biyiklioglu]

sed -n '2,$p' filename

will also print lines from 2 to the end of the file...

[Gavin Clarke]

Attached Handy one-liners for SED, which I originally got from the forums. It might not be the latest version.

I hope you like it.

[Fred Martin_1]

sometimes i use awk for this, when the file is large and I don't trust tail.

Assume there are three header lines:

awk '{if(NR>3){print}}' filename

[Sorrel G. Jakins]

Thank you Gavin for that very handy file.