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  3. Introduction to Shell

Exercise

How can I use a command's output as an input?

Suppose you want to get lines from the middle of a file. More specifically, suppose you want to get lines 3-5 from one of our data files. You can start by using head to get the first 5 lines and redirect that to a file, and then use tail to select the last 3:

head -n 5 seasonal/winter.csv > top.csv
tail -n 3 top.csv

A quick check confirms that this is lines 3-5 of our original file, because it is the last 3 lines of the first 5.

Instructions 1/2

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  • 1

    Select the last two lines from seasonal/winter.csv and save them in a file called bottom.csv.

  • 2

    Select the first line from bottom.csv in order to get the second-to-last line of the original file.