dear lazyweb

[rone]

I want to run a command that will give me the contents of a file, except for the last two lines.  I know that tail -2 filename will give me the last two lines of a file, and head -2 filename will give me the first two lines of a file.  Now, tail +2 filename will give me contents of a file, starting with line 2.  It's not a symmetrical option, but i can at least work with that.  However, the head command lacks this elegant mode; otherwise, i would infer that head +3 filename would give me what i want.  Is there a simple command that can do what i want?  I figure i can implement this in some fugly perl script, but that is not the damn point.

Comments

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

Heh, I just thought of an evil one.

tac foo | tail +2 | tac

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Heh, a friend elsewhere suggested that one, too. Only a weenie OS like Linux would have a utility like tac.

[dagbrown.livejournal.com]

It actually had its genesis in a bunch of other weenies: the wacky land of BSD ("cat came back from Berkeley waving flags").

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ironic that FreeBSD doesn't have it anymore...

[glaucon.livejournal.com]

tac!
fucking awesome!

this is my new favorite unix command.
(replacing "yes")

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

I was going to suggest that, but with tail -r instead of tac (and the intimation that some systems may provide that functionality by a different means).