How to View the Start of a File in Linux (head)

head prints the first lines of a file, by default the first 10.

Key points

• head -n 20 file.txt prints the first 20 lines instead of the default 10
• Useful for quickly previewing a large file, like a CSV export, without opening the whole thing
• The counterpart command, tail, does the same for the end of a file

Example

head -n 20 data.csv