Linux head/tail with offset

Question

Is there a way in Linux to ask for the Head or Tail but with an additional offset of records to ignore.

For example if the file example.lst contains the following:

row01 row02 row03 row04 row05 

And I use head -n3 example.lst I can get rows 1 - 3 but what if I want it to skip the first row and get rows 2 - 4?

I ask because some commands have a header which may not be desirable within the search results. For example du -h ~ --max-depth 1 | sort -rh will return the directory size of all folders within the home directory sorted in descending order but will append the current directory to the top of the result set (i.e. ~).

The Head and Tail man pages don't seem to have any offset parameter so maybe there is some kind of range command where the required lines can be specified: e.g. range 2-10 or something?

Answer 1

From man tail:

   -n, --lines=K         output the last K lines, instead of the last 10;          or use -n +K to output lines starting with the Kth 

You can therefore use ... | tail -n +2 | head -n 3 to get 3 lines starting from line 2.

Non-head/tail methods include sed -n "2,4p" and awk "NR >= 2 && NR <= 4".

Answer 2

To get the rows between 2 and 4 (both inclusive), you can use:

head -n4 example.lst | tail -n+2 

or

head -n4 example.lst | tail -n3