Command to get nth line of STDOUT

Question

Using sed, just for variety:

ls -l | sed -n 2p

Using this alternative, which looks more efficient since it stops reading the input when the required line is printed, may generate a SIGPIPE in the feeding process, which may in turn generate an unwanted error message:

ls -l | sed -n -e '2{p;q}'

I've seen that often enough that I usually use the first (which is easier to type, anyway), though ls is not a command that complains when it gets SIGPIPE.

For a range of lines:

ls -l | sed -n 2,4p

For several ranges of lines:

ls -l | sed -n -e 2,4p -e 20,30p
ls -l | sed -n -e '2,4p;20,30p'

ls -l | head -2 | tail -1

Alternative to the nice head / tail way:

ls -al | awk 'NR==2'

or

ls -al | sed -n '2p'

From sed1line:

# print line number 52
sed -n '52p'                 # method 1
sed '52!d'                   # method 2
sed '52q;d'                  # method 3, efficient on large files

From awk1line:

# print line number 52
awk 'NR==52'
awk 'NR==52 {print;exit}'          # more efficient on large files

For the sake of completeness ;-)

shorter code

find / | awk NR==3

shorter life

find / | awk 'NR==3 {print $0; exit}'

Try this sed version:

ls -l | sed '2 ! d'

It says "delete all the lines that aren't the second one".