To view lines in the middle of a file

The command "head" is used to view the top lines of a file and command "tail" is used to view lines at the end.

What if we want to view the lines in between, that is neither from the top nor from the bottom.

For example let us say we have a file with the following contents:

file1 :

Linux has completed its 20 years of existence. In these 20 years it has seen phenomenal growth and support from industry as well as individuals. Today linux runs in more embedded systems than any other OS. The smart phone market is dominated by android which is also a linux derivative. Linux runs in the servers that powers facebook,twitter,amazon and other high data and security servers. With the world slowly waking up to the open source initiatives and computing moving towards cloud, the competitors of linux are having a hard time. The future of linux looks bright from where we look today and gives us the hope that the penguin will keep smiling.

We can use the head command to view the top 3 lines

$ head -3 file1 Linux has completed its 20 years of existence. In these 20 years it has seen phenomenal growth and support from industry as well as individuals. Today linux runs in more embeddes systems than any other OS.

We can use the tail command to view the bottom 3 lines

$ tail -3 file1 The future of linux looks bright from where we look today and gives us the hope that the penguin will keep smiling.

But how to view the 3 lines in the center. Here are two ways of doing it.

Using a combination of head and tail

$ head -6 file1 | tail -3 The smart phone market is dominated by android which is also a linux derivative. Linux runs in the servers that powers facebook,twitter,amazon and other high data and security servers. Linux though has not broken into the desktop market as much as linux enthusiast might like, but the efforts of ubuntu has sure not gone in vain with a slight increase in the desktop share over time.

Using awk

$ awk 'NR==3,NR==6{print $0}' file1 Today linux runs in more embedded systems than any other OS. The smart phone market is dominated by android which is also a linux derivative. Linux runs in the servers that powers facebook,twitter,amazon and other high data and security servers. Linux though has not broken into the desktop market as much as linux enthusiast might like, but the efforts of ubuntu has sure not gone in vain with a slight increase in the desktop share over time.