UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

if we happen to have a very big .csv file we cannot or dont care to edit,
is there a way to check if the file contains a header row?

Use head
head -n 1 file

No, but why not open it? No line feeds or carriage returns to break it up? Remember that head requires a line feed to stop, so it might read the whole file.

C or PERL can read just N bytes. You could write a C or PERL program to look just so far for your patterns and then stop.

Some versions of head or tail can read just N bytes (as opposed to lines) from the front of the file, or you could write one, and then a script could add a line feed and pipe it to grep to examine.

The tr command works at the byte level, so you could take something like an AML file with no linefeeds or carriage returns and turn all the '>' into '\12' (linefeed) and then head off N lines and grep for the pattern.