i am trying to append a 5 line SGML file(file1) with a 500,000 line SGML file (file2).

file1 is a template, so i wish to preserve.
i only want to add lines 5 to the end of file2.

i have:
cp file1 temp1
sed -n '5,$p' file2 >> temp1

when i check the tail of temp1, i consistantly find the last 4 lines missing.

i have run a line count on file2 and inserted in sed -n '5,500000p' with same result.

please note, filepaths are absolute because the script runs from a seperate script folder.

can someone help?

It's not clear if you want to prepend or append, but one of these should do it:

cat extra file1 > file2
cat file1 extra > file2

extra is file with the 5 new lines.

thanks for replying Perderabo, but i was probably not clear.

file one actually has 7 lines. i want to replace the first 4 lines of file2 with file1.

so i copied file1 to temp1 (new file), then tried to append the new file with lines 5 thru 548203 of file2.

everything works except that i am always missing lines 548200 to 5482003 in the new file.

i do not know how to extract lines 5 thru 548203 using cat. also, because the line count is a variable i'd prefer to not use head | tail.

nevermind...figured it out. thanks!