I am a little rusty, but I think a pipe with head and tail may do what you want
head -n < file will display/select the first n lines tail -n <file will display the last n lines tail +n < file will display from the the nth line onwards (or may be it is n+1th I told you I am rusty :-% For convenience, you can write a shell script (calling it scoop may be ) which takes two command line arguments - the line number from which you want to scoop and the line number up to which you want to scoop head -$1 > /tmp/x1 tail +$2 >/tmp/x2 cat /tmp/x1 /tmp/x2 These three lines can be made into a sheel script and the file you want to do surgery can be redirected to it; the excised lines will be displayed on screen and you can redirect that to a file. If you want to select the lines in the middle, rather than discard from the middle, the following one-liner will be a good starting point (same command line args) head -$2 |tail +$1 Just verify that you are not hit by the off by 1 error anywhere I multiboot win 95 and RH 5.2 Linux; I am in the middle of replacing RH 5.2 with debian. I am now sending this from Win95; so I am not able to offer a tested solution. Hope this helps P Asokan P S: On re-reading, the note looked too 'teacherish'; pardon me if it was more detailed than necessary ----- Original Message ----- From: Lance Hoffmeyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Debian-user <debian-user@lists.debian.org> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 1999 7:37 AM Subject: Removeing N lines from a file >How can I use gawk or some other program to remove a number of lines >from a text file. Initially, I only need to delete the top 10 lines >from a file but it might be useful to know how to delete lines from any >part of the file. The top 10 lines from each of these files vary in >what they may contain so I need to indiscriminately delete them. I >figured gawk is what I would need to use to perform this task but if >someone ones of something else that might do this that would be fine >too. > >Thanks > >Lance > > >-- >Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null > >
