echo lines of file - but no more than N characters per line

Question

I would like to print the tail of a file (could be also head or cat in general) to the screen but restrict the number of characters per line.

So if a file contains ...

abcdefg
abcd
abcde
abcdefgh

... and the maximum number is 5, then the following should be printed:

abcde
abcd
abcde
abcde

How would I do that?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 09 '16 at 13:17

4

tail yourfile |cut -c 1-5
....

answered Aug 09 '16 at 13:17

user1700494

2

Note that in the case of current versions of GNU cut, that only works for single-byte characters (it returns only the first 5 bytes of each line). Hopefully, that will be fixed in a future version (some vendors like RedHat I believe have patches for that). – Stéphane Chazelas Aug 09 '16 at 13:45

the_velour_fog · Answer 2 · 2016-08-09T13:49:37.263

1

You could try

sed 's/\(.\{5\}\).*/\1/' file.txt

edited Aug 09 '16 at 13:49

answered Aug 09 '16 at 13:25

the_velour_fog

That is more readable with ERE: sed -rn 's/(.{5}).*/\1/p' file.txt – Law29 Aug 09 '16 at 13:26

heemayl · Answer 3 · 2016-08-09T14:02:40.440

1

So many ways:

grep:

$ tail file.txt | grep -o '^.\{,5\}' 
abcde
abcd
abcde
abcde

sed:

$ tail file.txt | sed 's/^\(.\{,5\}\).*/\1/'
abcde
abcd
abcde
abcde

awk:

$ tail file.txt | awk '{print substr($0,1,5)}'
abcde
abcd
abcde
abcde

edited Aug 09 '16 at 14:02

answered Aug 09 '16 at 13:26

heemayl

3 Answers3