### head shows the first you 10 lines of a file.

if you pipe a program’s output to head, the program will stop after printing 10 lines (it gets sent SIG PIPE)

tail

tail shows the last 10 lines!

tail -f FILE will follow:

print any new lines added to the end of FILE. Super useful for log files!

-n NUM

-n NUM (either head or tail) will change the # lines shown

NUM can also be negative. Example: $ head -n 5 file.txt will print all lines except the last 5

-C NUM

show the first /last NUM bytes of the file

$ head -c 1k will show the first 1024 bytes

tail –retry

keep trying to open file if it’s inaccesible

tail –pid PID

stop when process PID stops running (with -f)

tail –follow-name

Usually tail -f will follow a file descriptor.

tail --follow-name FILENAME will keep following the same file name, even if the file descriptor changes