Is there any bash command that will let you get the nth line of STDOUT?
That is to say, something that would take this
$ ls -l
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel my.txt
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel files.txt
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel here.txt
and do something like
$ ls -l | magic-command 2
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel files.txt
I realize this would be bad practice when writing scripts meant to be reused, BUT when working with the shell day to day it'd be useful to me to be able to filter my STDOUT in such a way.
I also realize this would be semi-trivial command to write (buffer STDOUT, return a specific line), but I want to know if there's some standard shell command to do this that would be available without me dropping a script into place.
Hmm
sed did not work in my case. I propose:
for "odd" lines 1,3,5,7... ls |awk '0 == (NR+1) % 2'
for "even" lines 2,4,6,8 ls |awk '0 == (NR) % 2'
ls -l | head -2 | tail -1
Alternative to the nice head / tail way:
ls -al | awk 'NR==2'
or
ls -al | sed -n '2p'
Is Perl easily available to you?
$ perl -n -e 'if ($. == 7) { print; exit(0); }'
Obviously substitute whatever number you want for 7.
For the sake of completeness ;-)
shorter code
find / | awk NR==3
shorter life
find / | awk 'NR==3 {print $0; exit}'
For more completeness..
ls -l | (for ((x=0;x<2;x++)) ; do read ; done ; head -n1)
Throw away lines until you get to the second, then print out the first line after that. So, it prints the 3rd line.
If it's just the second line..
ls -l | (read; head -n1)
Put as many 'read's as necessary.
Another poster suggested
ls -l | head -2 | tail -1
but if you pipe head into tail, it looks like everything up to line N is processed twice.
Piping tail into head
ls -l | tail -n +2 | head -n1
would be more efficient?
You can use awk:
ls -l | awk 'NR==2'
The above code will not get what we want because of off-by-one error: the ls -l command's first line is the total line. For that, the following revised code will work:
ls -l | awk 'NR==3'
Yes, the most efficient way (as already pointed out by Jonathan Leffler) is to use sed with print & quit:
set -o pipefail # cf. help set
time -p ls -l | sed -n -e '2{p;q;}' # only print the second line & quit (on Mac OS X)
echo "$?: ${PIPESTATUS[*]}" # cf. man bash | less -p 'PIPESTATUS'
Try this sed
version:
ls -l | sed '2 ! d'
It says "delete all the lines that aren't the second one".
Source: Stackoverflow.com