Is there a way to simulate the *nix head command in DOS? I have a file and I want a way to stip off the first n-lines of text. For example:
D:\>type file.txt
line one
line two
line three
D:\>*[call to head]* > result.txt
D:\>type result.txt
line two
line three
I don't think there is way out of the box. There is no such command in DOS and batch files are far to limited to simulate it (without major pain).
If you want the head command, one easy way to get it is to install Cygwin. Then you'll have all the UNIX tools at your disposal.
If that isn't a good solution, then you can try using findstr and do a search for the end-of-line indicator.
findstr on MSDN: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490907.aspx
You could get CoreUtils from GnuWin32, which is a collection of standard unix tools, ported to Windows.
It, among other things, contains head.
The native DOS command "more" has a +n option that will start outputting the file after the nth line:
more +2 myfile.txt
Will start outputting at line 3. This is actually the inverse of Unix head:
head -2 myfile.txt
will print the first 2 lines, whereas
more +2 myfile.txt
will print everything after the first two lines.
When using more +n that Matt already mentioned, to avoid pauses in long files, try this:
more +1 myfile.txt > con
When you redirect the output from more, it doesn't pause - and here you redirect to the console. You can similarly redirect to some other file like this w/o the pauses of more if that's your desired end result. Use > to redirect to file and overwrite it if it already exists, or >> to append to an existing file. (Can use either to redirect to con.)
Well, this will do it, but it's about as fast as it looks (roughly O(n*m), where n is the number of lines to display and m is the total number of lines in the file):
for /l %l in (1,1,10) do @for /f "tokens=1,2* delims=:" %a in ('findstr /n /r "^" filename ^| findstr /r "^%l:"') do @echo %b
Where "10" is the number of lines you want to print, and "filename" is the name of the file.