Do you have a really long log file and you need to extract a portion from it?
Well, there are different approaches to this and it depends from what you really need from that file.
I’ll show you the case where I need to extract a portion of y lines from an x line number :
- get the line number
to get the line number, if you don’t know it already, use grep and a pattern
grep -n pattern /var/log/examplelogfile - extract the portion
use head to output the first 200 lines and use tail to take 100 lines starting from the bottom
head -n 200 /var/log/examplelogfile | tail -n 100
In this case, I extracted the portion from line 100 to line 200. In other words, I’ve taken 100 lines starting from line 100.
I hope I’ve been clear enough!
ps. thanks to my colleague Mauro for the second part of this trick.
