[Linux-disciples] Deleting the first N lines of a file

[Adam Rosi-Kessel]

Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 08:55:49PM -0500, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
>> Does anyone know of a very fast way to delete the first N
>> lines of a file? (That is, after the deletion, the file's
>> size will reduce from N + k to k lines.) Speed is rather
>> important here, so something like
> 
> I was thinking that maybe
> 
> NUMLINES=`some command involving grep`
> head -n $NUMLINES filename > outfile.txt
> sed -i "1,${NUMLINES}d" filename
> 
> would do the trick. But I'm playing with that now, on a
> fairly representative very large file, and it seems to take
> a very long time. Hm.

It doesn't matter if it takes a long time, so long as it doesn't lose hits,
right?

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