How to quickly show Nth line from the file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

How can I quickly show Nth line from the huge file(at least more than 15GB)? I used the following script but seems slower.

See 2717298 th line.

head -2717298 data0802.dat | tail -1

Thank you very much

2

You're going to need to read the file until line 2717298 and that will take some time. But try:

sed -n '2717298{p;q;}' datafile

3 
 sed 'NUMBERq;d' file

.. where NUMBER is the line number you want displayed

4

Thank you very much

:slight_smile:

5

for large files , use awk

# wc -l file
9812605 file
# time sed -n '2717298{p;q;}' file
2717298 this is a line

real    0m9.412s
user    0m9.313s
sys     0m0.080s
# time sed '2717298q;d' file
2717298 this is a line

real    0m9.595s
user    0m9.329s
sys     0m0.052s
# time awk 'NR==2717298{print;exit}' file
2717298 this is a line

real    0m1.227s
user    0m1.148s
sys     0m0.072s
# time sed -n '2717298{p;q;}' file
2717298 this is a line

real    0m9.616s
user    0m9.429s
sys     0m0.080s
# time sed '2717298q;d' file
2717298 this is a line

real    0m9.105s
user    0m9.005s
sys     0m0.084s
# time awk 'NR==2717298{print;exit}' file
2717298 this is a line

real    0m1.247s
user    0m1.164s
sys     0m0.080s