How to remove the headers from a file using command in Linux?

Question

I have some unique requirement, where I need to do something like this -
1. My script takes the argument as file name which is absolute filename.
2. I need to separate the filename and directory from this absolute file name for the further processing.

Any suggestions -

Answer 1

A ‘sed’ command comes to rescue here, when we need to delete certain lines of a file.

Here it the exact command to remove headers from a file (or first line of a file).

# sed '1 d' file.txt

The only problem with above command is that, it outputs the file on standard output without the first line. In order to save the output to file, we need to use redirect operator which will redirects the output to a file.

# sed '1 d' file.txt > new_file.txt

Well the built in switch ‘-i‘ for sed command, can perform this operation without a redirect operator.

# sed -i '1 d' file.txt