Skipping a Header in a File in bash

You have a file with one or more header lines and you need to process just the data, and skip the header.

Use the tail command with a special argument. For example, to skip the first line of a file:

$ tail +2 lines
Line 2

Line 4
Line 5

$ tail +2 lines

Line 2

Line 4

Line 5

An argument to tail, which is a number starting dash (-), will specify a line offset relative to the end of the file.

So tail -10 file shows the last 10 lines of file, which also happens to be the default if you don’t specify anything.

But a number starting with a plus (+) sign is an offset relative to the top of the file.

Thus, tail +1 file gives you the entire file, the same as cat. +2 skips the first line, and so on.