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

Syntax

The command syntax is:

head [options] file_name

By default, will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output.

Option flags

Other commands

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 on Version 6 Unix, and included head.

Implementations

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

See also

• tail (Unix)

• dd (Unix)

• List of Unix commands

References

External links

• head manual page from GNU coreutils.

• FreeBSD documentation for head