problem in seeing a lengthy line

hi ,
i need to check the first line of a tilde(~) delimitted source file, so i wrote a command as follows
head -1 <source filename>

but the problem is that the line is too lengthy,as it spans out of the window,so im not able to see the line till end.can anybody please suggest a workaround for this??

regards
Angel

you mean, you are not able to see the contents in terminal ?

awk ' { if (NR=1) print $0}' filename

Use the fold command, something like (for lines of 60 characters):

head -1 <source filename> | fold -60