Open only the first few lines of a file in Vim

Question

I'm working with a CSV that's just shy of 1 GB. I want to see the the file's structure and a sample of the data, but I don't want to open the entire file. How can I load the first few rows in Vim? If it makes a difference, I'm using MacVim.

Answer 1

I generally use a command like head or tail for seeing partial content of large files.

$head -10 <large file>

Answer 2

If you must do it from vim, use this:

:r !head -10 path/to/big.file

That would get the first 10 lines of big.file and insert them into the current buffer.