How can I remove the first line of a file with sed?

Question

the following lines append the content of essay_i.txt to the end of essay1.txt;

touch essay1.txt
for (( i = 1 ; i <= 10 ; i++ )); do
sed '2p' essay_"${i}".txt >> essay1.txt
done

how should i change it so that the first line of each of essay_i.txt are not copied (i.e. only copy line 2->end) ?

Is it the appending you want, or the sed version? For straight shell, you could use ` tail -n +2 essay_i.txt >> essay1.txt `
Your script copies the seconds line twice, is that intentional? (actually, it doesn't work at all for me, so I'm guessing)
You can do it without the loop too: awk 'FNR>1' essay_[0-9].txt essay_[1-9][0-9].txt > essay1.txt. Would be even shorter if the numbers in the filenames were zero-padded.

Stefano Palazzo · Accepted Answer · 2011-02-07 18:07:32Z

To suppress the first line, use '1d' (i.e. line 1, delete):

touch essay1.txt
for file in essay_*; do
  sed '1d' $file >> essay1.txt
done

the output will be

~$ cat essay1.txt 
line 2 from essay 1
line 3 from essay 1
line 2 from essay 2
line 3 from essay 2
...

for all of the files named essay_* in the current working directory.

Instead of using sed, you can also use tail to do this job:

tail -n +2 $file >> essay1.txt

Where +2 means from the second line onwards (-n 2 would be the last two lines).

1 Answer