Shell Programming and Scripting

@Methyl -- It seemed a waste starting n-10 processes just to remove the first line of a file. I didn't do any experiments, but with the -i option I would assume that sed then writes n-1 lines to a tmp file and does a rename. That's lots of I/O that isn't necessary since it can be done with just two passes.

I tend not to use -i, as you point out it's less portable, and if writing for greater portability (assuming modern shell) might do it this way:

Code:

sed  "1,$(( $(wc -l <file) - 10 ))d" file >file.new && mv file.new file

Thanks, really good suggestions/examples in this thread. This is not for homework but an actual script I am doing.

Still think my solutions are better, particularly in the case where file has less than 10 lines!

True -- the assumption like I made that there'd always be 10 lines is the kind that will bite you at 3 in the morning.