Copy/Paste part of a file into another file using Terminal (or Shell)

Question

I am trying to copy part of a .txt file from the line number n to the line number n+y (let's say 1000 to 1000000).

I tried with operators and sed, and it failed. Here's the command I tried:

sed -n "1000, 1000000p" path/first/file > path/second/file

There's nothing wrong with the sed command you give in the example; in what way does it fail? — William Pursell, Feb 13 '12 at 12:29
If the input file has incorrect line endings, you will need to convert them first. Try `dos2unix`. — tripleee, Feb 14 '12 at 11:11

score 24 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 13 '12 at 11:36

24

if you know how many lines are in your source file (wc -l) you can do this .. assume 12000 lines and you want lines 2000 - 7000 in your new file (total of 5000 lines).

cat myfile | tail -10000 | head -5000 > newfile

Read the last 10k lines, then read the 1st 5k lines from that.

answered Feb 13 '12 at 11:36

FreudianSlip

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You do not need to know how many lines are in the file: simply put the head first. – jfg956 Feb 13 '12 at 15:47
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And if you want to put the tail first, you can use `tail -n +2000`. This also takes less buffer space. – jfg956 Feb 13 '12 at 15:52
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Bling, Useless Use of Cat. Besides, the original `sed` command was just fine for this. – tripleee Feb 14 '12 at 09:07
Thnx everybody for the answer, both the sed and the cad command worked ;). – WarioBrega Mar 14 '12 at 18:02

score 3 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 24 '18 at 15:02

3

sed command should work fine, replace double quotes with single quotes.

sed -n '1000, 1000000p' path/first/file > path/second/file

edited Jul 24 '18 at 15:02

Raghav Dinesh

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answered May 15 '15 at 22:14

Oscar Perëz

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Copy/Paste part of a file into another file using Terminal (or Shell)

2 Answers2

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