Bash Print nth Line - Shell/Bash

Have you ever needed to print a specific line from a text file in Bash? This tutorial will show you how to do so using a simple script.

Solution

Our script will take in two arguments: the file path and the line number we want to print. Here's the code:

#!/bin/bash
file=$1
line_number=$2
sed -n "${line_number}p" $file

We start off by setting the file path and line number arguments in variables. The sed command is then used to print the specific line number we want (${line_number}p). The -n flag suppresses the default printing behavior of sed, and the $file argument tells sed to operate on the given file.

Usage

Save the script in a file with .sh extension (for example, print_nth_line.sh), make it executable with chmod +x, and run it with the file path and line number arguments:

./print_nth_line.sh path/to/file.txt 5

This will print the 5th line of file.txt.

Conclusion

Printing a specific line from a file in Bash is a simple task that can be accomplished with sed. The script we've shown here can easily be modified to handle other similar use cases, such as printing a range of lines or printing specific patterns of text.