General :: Display Specific Block Of Contents Or Lines In Output?

Consider a situation in which you want to display only specific lines of contents from a file or of a command's output. Yes, we have head and tail commands. But, how to view all the lines of a file except the last one or vise versa when we don't know the count of lines in advance?

Consider this output:

Code:

[root@localhost ~]# ps au | grep bash
root 6316 0.0 0.0 4672 1440 tty1 Ss+ Apr22 0:02 -bash
root 20847 0.2 0.0 4672 1432 pts/0 Ss Apr23 0:12 -bash
root 21167 0.0 0.0 3920 660 pts/0 S+ 01:00 0:00 grep bash

Here, I don't want the last line (in italic) to be included in the result since the last line is due to "grep bash" in the devised command "ps au | grep bash". Well, we can rewrite the devised command:

Quote:

"ps au | grep bash | head -n 2"

But, again, here we are specifying the count of lines to be included. But, in the presented problem we don't know any count in advance!