Very true, and a arguably more intuitive solution than using sed.

The man page for tail in Linux hardly mentions using '+'. It's not
even shown in the SYNOPSIS; it's snuck into a descriptive paragraph
after the list of options.

On Solaris, '+' is actualy shown in the first line of the SYNOPSIS.
Much more visible.

Thanks for pointing this out (again). It will be useful to others in
the future.

Grant

On 6/30/06, Jeff Shippen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

 heh, you guys are acting like you never got the e-mail i sent days ago
regarding the tail command.

 tail +301 bigfile will start at line 301 and display till the end, you can
then use redirection to put it in a new file.  So you don't have to know the
total number of lines, just the number of lines in the beginning that you
want to get rid of, which you mentioned already was 300.
 Jeff


 Grant Kelly wrote:
I did play with the tail command, but as mentioned, you still have to
 know the total number of lines in the file. `wc -l` took about 5
 minutes to calculate this number, and then you've still got to run it
 through tail.

 Also, I wanted to remove the lines rather than ignore them so that, if
 needed, I could reuse the file or pass it on to others without them
 having to go through the same problem I did.
 Furthermore, the CREATE TABLE commands were preceeded by something
 like IF EXISTS DROP table.  I had already created the tables and
 changed them slightly, so I didn't want them re-created.  sed was the
 quickest and simplest tool for the job in this case.

 So much for a "quick question".... over 30 messages in this thread!

 Grant


 On 6/30/06, James Washer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Jeezus...

 YES... the tail command gives the last "xx" lines of the files.. but
without counting the lines of the 2+GB file, one has no idea how many lines
that is. Counting the lines of an arbitrarily large file, when there is no
need to do so, is far from efficient.

 Further try "cat < head -3 /etc/passwd" and report back on the shell error
you receive. That's just not legal shell syntax.


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