Content-type: text/html Man page of head

head

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 1 Feb 1995
Index Return to Main Contents
 

NAME

head - display first few lines of files  

SYNOPSIS

head [-number | -n number] [filename...]  

DESCRIPTION

The head utility copies the first number of lines of each filename to the standard output. If no filename is given, head copies lines from the standard input. The default value of number is 10 lines.

When more than one file is specified, the start of each file will look like:

==> filename <==

Thus, a common way to display a set of short files, identifying each one, is:

example% head -9999 filename1 filename2 ...
 

OPTIONS

The following options are supported:

-n number The first number lines of each input file will be copied to standard output. The number option-argument must be a positive decimal integer.

-number The number argument is a positive decimal integer with the same effect as the -n number option.

If no options are specified, head will act as if -n 10had been specified.  

OPERANDS

The following operand is supported:

file A path name of an input file. If no file operands are specified, the standard input will be used.

 

USAGE

See largefile(5) for the description of the behavior of head when encountering files greater than or equal to 2 Gbyte ( 2 **31
 bytes).  

EXAMPLES

Example 1: Writing the first ten lines of all files

To write the first ten lines of all files (except those with a leading period) in the directory:

example% head *
 

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of head: LANG, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.  

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned:

0 Successful completion.

>0 An error occurred.

 

ATTRIBUTES

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPEATTRIBUTE VALUE
AvailabilitySUNWcsu
CSIenabled
Interface StabilityStandard

 

SEE ALSO

cat(1), more(1), pg(1), tail(1), attributes(5), environ(5), largefile(5), standards(5)


 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
OPERANDS
USAGE
EXAMPLES
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
EXIT STATUS
ATTRIBUTES
SEE ALSO

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 02:39:27 GMT, October 02, 2010