HEAD(1) BSD General Commands Manual HEAD(1) NAME head — display first lines of a file SYNOPSIS head [-n count | -c bytes] [file ...] DESCRIPTION This filter displays the first count lines or bytes of each of the speci‐ fied files, or of the standard input if no files are specified. If count is omitted it defaults to 10. If more than a single file is specified, each file is preceded by a header consisting of the string “==> XXX <==” where “XXX” is the name of the file. EXIT STATUS The head utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. EXAMPLES To display the first 500 lines of the file foo: $ head -n 500 foo head can be used in conjunction with tail(1) in the following way to, for example, display only line 500 from the file foo: $ head -n 500 foo | tail -n 1 SEE ALSO tail(1) HISTORY The head command appeared in PWB UNIX. BSD March 16, 2013 BSD