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Does anyone know of a simple one liner to read the first line of a file in bash?

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5 Answers

up vote 15 down vote accepted 
read -r FIRSTLINE < filename

Same result as the other answers but faster because it doesn't spawn any process, as "read" is a built-in bash command.

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good point, +1 for you – AlberT Sep 18 '09 at 12:21
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up vote 11 down vote 
head -1

simply

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up vote 6 down vote 
FIRSTLINE=`head -n 1 filename`

Stores the line in a variable for later use (note the inverted apostrophes).

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$(command) is an alternate form that avoid the use of back ticks, not even simple to be found on certain keyboards. – AlberT Sep 18 '09 at 8:48
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good answer, but I'm voting down because e-t172's answer is better. Read is intended for this, and it's built-in to bash, as he says. – Lee B Sep 18 '09 at 10:13
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nah, voting down a "good answer" becouse it is not the best possible is not so polite don't you think? – AlberT Sep 18 '09 at 13:16
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Lee - Why not just upvote the one you like instead? Downvotes should only be given for factually incorrect information or off topic stuff. – MDMarra Sep 19 '09 at 2:53
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up vote 2 down vote 
awk 'NR == 1' /etc/passwd
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this will scan full file, then return the first line, which is inefficient for large file. read -r is better. – Richard Mar 12 at 18:24
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up vote 1 down vote

head -n 1 should do the trick

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