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What command could I create that will list the first 4 lines of all the files in a given directory?

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  • 2
    head -4 /some/directory/*? – muru Dec 6 '15 at 22:04
  • echo "Please input the location of the directory you would like to list" read $dirname head -4 ~/$dirname/* How could i implement it to this? – S.Jones Dec 6 '15 at 22:19
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    Please edit your question to add clarifications. – muru Dec 6 '15 at 22:27
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[root@xxx httpd]# head -n 4 /var/log/httpd/*
==> /var/log/httpd/access_log <==
xxxx - - [06/Dec/2015:22:22:45 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 7 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.99 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.0.303.52"
xxxx - - [06/Dec/2015:22:22:46 +0100] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 291 "http://195.154.165.63:8001/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.99 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/1.0.303.52"

==> /var/log/httpd/access_log-20151018 <==
xxxx - - [12/Oct/2015:14:05:42 +0200] "GET /git HTTP/1.1" 404 281 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
xxxx - - [12/Oct/2015:14:05:42 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 289 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
xxxx - - [12/Oct/2015:14:05:43 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 289 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"
xxxx - - [12/Oct/2015:14:06:24 +0200] "GET /git HTTP/1.1" 502 465 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/40.0"

==> /var/log/httpd/access_log-20151115 <==
xxxx - - [14/Nov/2015:18:56:04 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 7 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0"
xxxx - - [14/Nov/2015:18:56:05 +0100] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 291 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0"
xxxx - - [14/Nov/2015:18:56:05 +0100] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 291 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/42.0"
xxxx - - [14/Nov/2015:18:58:28 +0100] "GET /phpmyadmin HTTP/1.1" 403 294 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:42.0) Gecko/20100101   Firefox/42.0"

It's a sample of my httpd directory with the command head -n 4 /var/log/httpd/* for the first 4 lines. Replace head -n 4 by head -n 1 for the first lines.

And you can replace the directory /var/log/httpd/* with your directory for example, /my/directory/* but don't forget the wildcard at the end (*). This wildcard permits to tell that we want all the (non-hidden) files in the directory.

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  • If you also want hidden files, you can use find: find /some/path -type f -exec head -4 {} +, this will also traverse subdirectories for you – Xophmeister Dec 7 '15 at 11:23
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If you only want those 4 lines content and not the file names:

awk 'FNR<=4' ./*.log

To have the lines prefixed with the file names:

awk 'FNR<=4 {print FILENAME ": " $0}' ./*.log

Or with GNU grep:

grep -Hm4 '^' ./*.log
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  • +1 for a (very) portable one (./ to avoid some pb with filenames, and awk is available on some (very) old systems where tail doesn't support more than 1 file). But gnu grep m4 is an oddity here... seems like it has a bit of "creeping-featurism" ^^ [edit: I looked into -m : it is in fact quite handy and clever, and I understand now why it's added in. Not out of context in grep at all, especially the way it handles the seeking position in the file] – Olivier Dulac Dec 7 '15 at 16:20
  • an alternative way: print the filename and then the lines : awk 'FNR==1 {printf "\n%s:\n",FILENAME } FNR<=4' ./*.log – Olivier Dulac Dec 7 '15 at 16:35
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If by "all files" you mean "regular files" and not directories, sockets, FIFOs, etc, then you'll need to find those using, well, find: 

find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f

and pass them to xargs to invoke head on them:

find "$dir" -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 head -n 4

If you also want to follow symbolic links that eventually point at regular files, then use -xtype in place of -type (or use find -L in place of find).

(I've assumed GNU find and xargs above; if you're not in GNU environment, see notes in the comments).

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  • 1
    Note that -maxdepth, -print0 and -0 are GNU extensions (though now supported by a few other implementations). POSIXly: find "$dir/." ! -name . -prune -type f -exec head -n 4 {} +. – Stéphane Chazelas Dec 7 '15 at 13:47
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    Note that xargs or -exec {} + may end up running head several times. If the last batch has only one file, its name will not be printed. GNU head has a -v option to work around that. – Stéphane Chazelas Dec 7 '15 at 13:49
  • Note that contrary to "$dir"/*, it will include hidden files and not sort the file list. – Stéphane Chazelas Dec 7 '15 at 13:50

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