an inspector/peeking function ... alternative to "head"

peek.bash

#print a specific line
li() { sed -n "$1"p ; }

lines() { sed -n "$1,$2"p ; }




#whitespace
ws() { echo -e "\t⋮\t⋮\t⋮" ; }			#could also do this once for each column à la (head -1 | tr -dC , | sed "s/,/\t⋮/g")





#inspect / peek
i() {
	local LINE_NUMBER= $(($RANDOM % `wc -l`))		#this can be worked up into something more … or less …
	
	
	# ( subshell ) <file
	(head -2 ; ws; li $LINE_NUMBER,$LINE_NUMBER+5 ; ws ; tail -3 )
	}





#nohead
nh() {
	tail -n +2 $1
}