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In a Unix shell, how can I pick a single line from a text file by its line number?

Say I want whatever is at line 3 in animals.txt to be written to stdout (bat bat bat).

monkey monkey monkey
cat cat cat
bat bat bat
horse horse horse

Is there a standard program or simple way to do this?

(There's also the case where the text file does not contain enough lines to contain the line number you ask for)

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1 Answer 1

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This is one way:

sed -n '3p' file

Here's another:

head -n 3 file | tail -n 1
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  • Thanks. Using head/tail like that didn't occur to me, for which I'm a bit ashamed :-)
    – xyz
    Sep 27, 2010 at 14:41

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