| head | |
| Developer: | Various open-source and commercial developers |
| Operating System: | Unix, Unix-like, MSX-DOS, IBM i |
| Platform: | Cross-platform |
| Genre: | Command |
| License: | coreutils GPLv3 |
head is a program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data.
The command syntax is:
head [options] (file_name)
By default, will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output.
Many early versions of Unix and Plan 9 did not have this command, and documentation and books used sed instead:
sed 5q filename
The example prints every line (implicit) and quit after the fifth.
Equivalently, awk may be used to print the first five lines in a file:
awk 'NR < 6' filename
However, neither sed nor awk were available in early versions of BSD, which were based onVersion 6 Unix, and included head.[1]
A head command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2.[2] The command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.[3]