Bash tool to get nth line from a file?

Question

Is there a "canonical" way of doing that? I've been using `head -n | tail -1` which does the trick, but I've been wondering if there's a Bash tool that specifically extracts a line (or a range of lines) from a file. By "canonical" I mean a program whose main function is doing that.

Answer 1

The easiest way I can think of without using head / tail is by using sed.

Example launch below displays the 4th line of file, if it has a 4th line, that is.

sed -n -e "4p" file

The -n option suppresses the default echo of sed's input, and the "np" command explicitly displays/prints the nth line of input ...