[wataru]

I'm trying to cut the output of something that returns several lines. I only want one of the lines, say the first one. How can I do that with the cut command? Specifically, I can't figure out what the delimiter should be for a new line (\n doesn't work).

Example:
blahblah | cut -d "delimiter" -f 1

I don't have to use cut, either, so if you have another suggestion I'm all ears. FYI, I tried, but I couldn't figure out how to do it in awk.

[Kristoff]

If you just want the first one, use head...


blahblahblah | head -n 1

will give you the first line of what blahblahblah returns.

[wataru]

Damn, why didn't I think of that!?

I ended up using a different approach that makes the whole thing unnecessary, but thanks!

[Mithras]

Incidentally, I wrote this little script (which I'm sure could be tightened up) to have a quick command for extracting just the line numbers I want:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;

if ( scalar @ARGV < 2 )
{
print STDERR "Usage: extract.pl start stop [filename]\n";
print " (omit filename to read from STDIN)\n";
exit 127;
}

my $start = shift;
my $stop = shift;

my $count=0;
while (<>)
{
$count++;
if ($count > $stop)
{
exit;
}
if ( $count >= $start )
{
print;
}
}

I save it as printlines so I can just do
complexstuff | printlines 5 10