Shortening large CSV on debian

Question

I have a very large CSV file and I need to write an app that will parse it but using the >6GB file to test against is painful, is there a simple way to extract the first hundred or two lines without having to load the entire file into memory?

The file resides on a Debian server.

Answer 1

Did you try the head command?

head -200 inputfile > outputfile

Answer 2

• head -10 file.csv > truncated.csv

  will take the first 10 lines of file.csv and store it in a file named truncated.csv

Answer 3

"The file resides on a Debian server."- this is interesting. This basically means that even if you use 'head', where does head retrieve the data from? The local memory (after the file has been copied) which defeats the purpose.