I am on Mac Os 10.14.6 and have a directory that contains hundreds of text files.
In the terminal, I would like to display a list of the first line of every file. How can I do this?
Steps I have tried
Googling around, I think the solution is to use a command called head. This is the command I have tried:
head -n 1 *
However, it produces output like this:
==> Minutes.txt <==
Minutes of the meeting
==> Daily Report.txt <==
Daily Report for Feb
==> Important incidents.txt <==
Incidents that happened yesterday
I don’t want the File 1.text headings. I just want it to be a list like this:
Minutes of the meeting
Daily Report for Feb
Incidents that happened yesterday
According to this page, you can use any one of the following commands to remove the headers:
-q, --quiet, --silent
So I revised my command as follows:
head -n1 -q *
But it produces the following error message:
head: illegal option -- q
usage: head [-n lines | -c bytes] [file ...]
How can I display a list of the first line of every file without the header. The solution doesn't have to use head although from my research, that seems to be the best approach.
I'm guessing your version of head doesn't support the -q option; what does man head (run on your Mac) show?
A small awk solution:
awk '{ print ; nextfile }' *
As a file is processed the first line is printed, then we skip to the next file; net result is that we only print the first line of each file.
Keep in mind this could generate some odd results depending on what matches * ... binary files? directories?