Re: Head isnt working as expected

[Paul Eggert]

"Karthik Shanmugam" <address@hidden> writes:

> cat .sh_history | head -3
>  
> but the result wasnt the expected one. instead it juz prints the
> first line.  When I openned the .sh_history file, i found ^A^A[
> header] in the first row.

Hmm, I don't get that behavior with coreutils 5.2.1:

   $ printf '\1\1[ header]\nline 2\nline 3\nline 4\n' >foo
   1001-penguin $ cat foo | head -n 3
   ^A^A[ header]
   line 2
   line 3

(Note that "head -3" is obsolete and won't work on a POSIX 1003.1-2001
system.)