How can I control what commands do?
You won't always want to look at the first 10 lines of a file,
so the shell lets you change head
's behavior
by giving it a command-line flag (or just "flag" for short).
If you run the command:
head -n 3 seasonal/summer.csv
head
will only display the first three lines of the file.
If you run head -n 100
,
it will display the first 100 (assuming there are that many),
and so on.
A flag's name usually indicates its purpose
(for example, -n
is meant to signal "number of lines").
Command flags don't have to be a -
followed by a single letter,
but it's a widely-used convention.
Note: it's considered good style to put all flags before any filenames, so in this course, we only accept answers that do that.
This exercise is part of the course
Introduction to Shell
Exercise instructions
Display the first 5 lines of winter.csv
in the seasonal
directory.
Hands-on interactive exercise
Turn theory into action with one of our interactive exercises
