Selecting Specific Lines of a File Using Head, Tail and Sed

This post contains a few handy commands used to select specific lines from a file.

Print the first N lines

head -N file

Print the last N lines

tail -N file

Print all EXCEPT the first N lines

tail +$((N+1)) file

Print all EXCEPT the last N lines

head -n -N file

Print lines N to M (inclusive)

sed -n 'N,Mp' file

Print line N

sed 'Nq;d' file

Print all EXCEPT line N

sed 'Nd' file

Print multiple lines, I, J, K etc
Assuming I > J > K:

sed 'Ip;Jp;Kq;d' file

The last q tells sed to quit when it reaches the Kth line instead of looping over the remaining lines that we are not interested in.