Using Linux Tail to Trim Your Files

by Ron on October 24, 2008

This tip is for my friend Scarb. For years I’ve used the Linux command “tail -f” for watching logs… but only recently did I discover its versatility for extracting parts of files.

Need to grab only the last 25 lines of a file?

tail -n 25 somefile.txt

How about the last 200000 bytes redirected to another file?

tail -c 200000 somefile.txt > newfile.txt

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Scarb 10.24.08 at 9:44 am

I don’t know how I ever got by without this information — thanks PixelGeek!

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