Apparently, though unproven, at 17:47 on Wednesday 22 September 2010, Al did
opine thusly:
> >> gr...@pazuzu ~ $ cat /etc/passwd | sed -n -e '4,10 p'
> >
> > Best solution so far, but useless use of cat, and the subshell overhead
> > of the pipe.
>
> Thank you. Nice solutions and they reveal that there is no "belly"
> like program in coreutils.
>
> I find it interesting, that the two bordercases are considered while
> the general approach (range), that would cover all, is missing. Is
> that rather for performance or for historical reasons?
>
> Al
Neither.
It's because one frequently wants to see the start or end of a file and much
less seldom something in the middle. When that is what you want, there are all
manner of other tools to find the bit you want, then display surrounding text.
grep -{ABC} is the usual tool for that
--
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
