Read only nth first lines [sublime text]

Question

I've got some files so big to directly open them in Sublime Text. Is there any way to open only the nth first lines? Something like head in bash? Thanks

Answer 1

If you're on Linux or Mac, or have Cygwin, Git Bash, or similar installed on a Windows machine, check out the split utility, which is part of the coreutils package. It does exactly what it says: it splits input into separate files. It is configurable via command-line options, like every Unix utility. For example, if you wanted to split your input file into separate 10,000-line files starting with notsobigfile and using numeric suffixes ending with .txt, you would run

split -d -l 10000 --additional-suffix=".txt" reallybigfile.txt notsobigfile 

and it would output files named notsobigfile01.txt, notsobigfile02.txt, etc. If this would generate more than 100 files (00 through 99), just add -a x where x is the number of digits (the default is 2).

For all the possible options, just read the man page:

man split

If you only want to output the first part of the file, check out the options for the -n/--number flag.

To figure out how many lines your input file has, run the word counting utility using the lines option:

wc -l reallybigfile.txt