sed to delete first 4 lines

[kholikt]

I am writing a script and I need to delete the first 4 lines from the file.

I am not very familiar with SED.

[Bernhard Mueller]

Hi,

sed -n -e 'p5,$' filename

Regards,
Bernhard

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Another solution, though a bit dirty, would be:

tail -$(expr `wc -l $1` - 4) $1

Or awk:

awk '{count++; if (count > 4) { print }}' $1

[kholikt]

Hi the Sed example I think is not working

[Graham Cameron_1]

Elmar's awk solution is more complex than need be. awk counts the rows for you, in NR, and an empty statement means print, thus:

awk '(NR>4)' inputfile

-- Graham

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Sorry Graham, you are right. I always forget that awk has some very useful internal vars.

As for the sed: the needs to be at the end, not the beginning. So it will be:
sed -n -e '5,$p'

[Bernhard Mueller]

Hi,

sorry for the mistake; Elmar made the right correction in the sed line, "5,$p" it has to be.

Elmar, the tail solution will not work on large files with several thousand lines.

Regards,
Bernhard

[Thierry Poels_1]

Hi,

ed filename << EOF
1,4d
w
q
EOF



regards,
Thierry.

[Pete Randall]

Attaching the "Handy One Liners for Sed" for future reference - very handy!


Pete