Deleting Lines from a File in Bash

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Deleting Lines from a File in Bash

Author：JIYIK Last Updated：2025/03/22 Views：

In Bash scripting, there are several ways to delete a line from a file. This article will discuss different ways to delete unnecessary lines from a file.

Assume that we have a text file named Test.txt with the following content.

This is the first line.
This is the second line.
This is the third line.
This is the fourth line.

Use tail to delete a line of a text file

We can use the built-in keyword tail in Bash to remove unwanted lines from our file.

Order:

$ tail -n +2 Test.txt

-n +2will print everything in the file except the first line. -n +1will print the entire file.

+The sign reverses the arguments and instructs tail to print everything.

Output:

This is the second line.
This is the third line.
This is the fourth line.

Use sed to delete a line of text file

Another built-in command in Bash is called sed, which is a built-in Linux tool mainly used for text manipulation. The full form of the command is Stream editor, as this keyword takes text in stream form and performs a number of operations.

In the following example, we will delete the first line from the file.

Order:

$ sed '1d' Test.txt

'1d'Instructs the sed command to perform the deletion operation on the first line.

Output:

This is the second line.
This is the third line.
This is the fourth line.

Deleting a line of text file using awk

In the following example, we will use to awkremove the first line from a file.

Order:

awk 'NR>1' Test.txt

'NR>1'Indicates that the line number is greater than 1. It will only display the lines after the first line.

Output:

This is the second line.
This is the third line.
This is the fourth line.

Summarize

We have shared three different methods to delete a line from a file, you can choose one according to your need. Please note that all the codes used in this article are written in Bash and will be executed only in Linux Shell environment.

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