Head

head is a program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data.

Syntax
The command syntax is:

head [options] &lt;file_name&gt;

By default,  will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output. The number of lines printed may be changed with a command line option. The following example shows the first 20 lines of filename:

head -n 20 filename

This displays the first 5 lines of all files starting with foo:

head -n 5 foo*

Most versions allow omitting  and instead directly specifying the number:. GNU head allows negative arguments for the  option, meaning to print all but the last - argument value counted - lines of each input file.

Flags
-c Copy first x number of bytes.

Other
Many early versions of Unix 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.

Implementations
A  command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2. The head command has also been ported to the IBM i operating system.