unix command to read line from a file by passing line number

Question

I am looking for a unix command to get a single line by passing line number to a big file (with around 5 million records). For example to get 10th line, I want to do something like

command file-name 10

Is there any such command available? We can do this by looping through each record but that will be time consuming process.

Answer 1

This forum entry suggests:

sed -n '52p' (file)

for printing the 52th line of a file.

Answer 2

Going forward, There are a lot of ways to do it, and other related stuffs.

If you want multiple lines to be printed,

sed -n -e 'Np' -e 'Mp'

Where N and M are lines which will only be printed. Refer this 10 Awesome Examples for Viewing Huge Log Files in Unix