Picking a single line from a text file by its line number

Question

In a Unix shell, how can I pick a single line from a text file by its line number?

Say I want whatever is at line 3 in animals.txt to be written to stdout (bat bat bat).

monkey monkey monkey
cat cat cat
bat bat bat
horse horse horse

Is there a standard program or simple way to do this?

(There's also the case where the text file does not contain enough lines to contain the line number you ask for)

See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6022384/bash-tool-to-get-nth-line-from-a-file — Joshua Goldberg, May 04 '17 at 21:23

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 27 '10 at 14:31

6

This is one way:

sed -n '3p' file

Here's another:

head -n 3 file | tail -n 1

answered Sep 27 '10 at 14:31

Dennis Williamson

Thanks. Using head/tail like that didn't occur to me, for which I'm a bit ashamed :-) – xyz Sep 27 '10 at 14:41

1 Answers1