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You can achieve the same result with other (more powerful) tools, but I like this approach because it’s the simplest I can think of.
Let’s say you have this text file called test.txt
line 1
line 2
line 3
Remove the first line
tail -n +2 test.txt
line 2
line 3
Remove the last line
head -n -1 test.txt
line 1
line 2
I used them directly on a file but keep in mind that they can always be used in one-liners like:
cat test.txt|tail -n +2|head -n -1
line 2
Hope it helps!
Andrea