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Let's say I have a command

ls -Bgclt /somwhere/in/the/past

How do I limit the output to show me only first 2 files? (except for having only 2 files in that directory)

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2 Answers 2

up vote 18 down vote accepted

Simple - you pipe the output through head:

ls -Bgclt /somwhere/in/the/past | head -n 3

You use -n 3 instead of -n 2 because of the 'total' line at the top of the ls output.

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Great, thanx! –  Denys S. Mar 30 '11 at 13:06

If you are really picky and only want to see the name of those two lines (that is, you want to exclude that first line with the word 'total' at the top) you can try

ls -Bgclt /somwhere/in/the/past | head -n 3 | tail -n 2
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I can exclude it by grep as well. –  Denys S. Mar 31 '11 at 14:07
@den-javamaniac : True, I was considering that as well. Only catch is if one of the files you list happen to contain the string you base the grep exclusion on. How likely that is to happen then is another matter. –  IllvilJa Mar 31 '11 at 15:06

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