Vi or Bash,way to delete everything but first N#lines
 

Ok so I have not idea how to do this and hope someone out there has a clue, what I need to be able to do is script a way to delete all BUT the first seven lines in a file, so everything below the seventh line is gone.

Anyone know any way of doing this? Any help is much appreciated :)

Hi,

sed could do that: sed '1,7d' yourfile

if you use a new sed you can use -i to change yourfile at once.

The above will delete the 1-7 lines and not what the OP requires.

Something like this would do,

Good intentions, wrong part of the file. Not the way to do your first post :(

Sorry for that!!!

Ok - this does work, but I am trying to use it remotely like so

ssh <hostname> /usr/local/bin/sed -i '18,$d' /file/file

Now I test it from <hostname> itself and the command works - but when I use ssh to run it I get this :

/usr/local/bin/sed: -e expression #1, char 3: unexpected `,'

Why would that be?

You need to escape the $ in that line:

ssh <hostname> /usr/local/bin/sed -i '18,\$d' /file/file

Ended up having to escape everything like so -


ssh <hostname> /usr/local/bin/sed -i \'18\,\$d\' /file

Works like a charm - Thanks for everyones help