Fastest way to display a certain line in a text file

[eholdo]

I've writing a script that searches specific lines within a file and outputs them to a variable. Head | Tail combinations and sed -n ?p combinations all seem to be very slow as you get into a large file (25MB or so). Is there some way, maybe with awk or nawk to quickly send a specific line to standard output?

I'm writing this in csh.


Thanks!

 

[MikeLacey]

a Perl script for you, should work on any perl v5 or greater.

$line_num = shift; # get line number from command line

while(<>){
next unless $. == $line_num;
last;
}

Script should be called with 2 arguments:

Line number to display and file to read. Mike

Want to get great answers to your Tek-Tips questions? Have a look at faq219-2884

It's like this; even samurai have teddy bears, and even teddy bears get drunk.

 

[mrregan]

Hi,
If the lines are fixed length, dd would be very fast. For example if you wanted the 10th line of a file with 80 character lines (including line feed),
dd if=infile of=outfile ibs=80 skip=9 count=1