sqx

head show the first lines

head prints the beginning of a file, 10 lines by default. Use it to peek at a file's header and format before you write a query, or to take a quick sample of a huge file.

Availability Preinstalled on macOS, Linux and BSD

Syntax

head [-n count] [file ...]

Common options

OptionWhat it does
-n NPrint the first N lines (default 10)
-c NPrint the first N bytes

Examples

See the header row of a CSV

head -n 1 users.csv

Peek at the first records

head -n 5 events.jsonl

Use head with sqx

Try a query on a sample first

Test a slow or complex query on the first thousand lines of a big file, then run it on everything.

head -n 1000 big.csv | sqx "SELECT country, COUNT(*) FROM stdin GROUP BY country"

Look at the first rows of a result

sqx -f events=events.jsonl -o csv "SELECT * FROM events ORDER BY amount DESC" | head -n 4

In SQL, LIMIT does the same job inside the query: SELECT * FROM stdin LIMIT 10.

Full documentation

This page covers the essentials. For every option, see the official documentation:

Or read the manual in your terminal: man head

cattailwc