head: Just Show Me the Beginning

You have a huge file. You don't want to see all 50,000 lines. You just want a preview:

head log.txt

First 10 lines. Quick peek. That's head.

Specifying How Many Lines

First 5 lines:

head -n 5 file.txt

First 20 lines:

head -n 20 file.txt

Or the shorthand:

head -5 file.txt
head -20 file.txt

In Pipelines

head is commonly used to limit output from other commands:

Top 10 most frequent items:

sort data.txt | uniq -c | sort -rn | head

First 5 matches:

grep "error" log.txt | head -5

Just the First Line

head -n 1 file.txt

Useful for grabbing headers or checking file format.

Multiple Files

head file1.txt file2.txt

Shows the first 10 lines of each, with headers separating them.

Quick Reference

| What you want | Command | |---------------|---------| | First 10 lines | head file | | First N lines | head -n N file or head -N file | | Limit pipe output | command \| head | | Just first line | head -n 1 file |

See Also

• tail - the opposite (end of file)

• cat - whole file

Practice

In CTF challenges, head helps you preview large files quickly and grab just the top results from sorted data.

head is for peeking. When you don't need the whole thing, just ask for the top.