And on systems where head was not present (seen some earlier), but sed was, you could do: sed nq file where n is some positive integer, to print the first n

And on systems where head was not present (seen some earlier), but sed was, you could do: sed nq file where n is some positive integer, to print the first n lines of the file. Also, body (the complement of head and tail :) # body sed -n $1,$2p $3