I have a file with 10000 lines.
I want to read the 8800th line into a variable without going through the complete file as it takes a long time. Also I don't know what text is in 8800th line.

unix will not be able to do a direct read on line 8800. But to pull that line:

line8800=`tail +8800 bigfile | head -1`

Hi Pras,
This is my script and it works great..I have tested it..

echo "Enter line number to print:\c"
read linenumber
echo "Enter Filename:\c"
read filename
echo "File is $filename and line is $linenumber"
count=`cat $filename|wc -l`
if test $linenumber -gt $count
then
echo "You entered line number $linenumber, while file has total $count lines"
exit
else
echo "Line is :"
head -$linenumber $filename|tee temp.txt|tail -1 temp.txt
rm -rf temp.txt
fi

-Parimal

> I want to read the 8800th line into a variable

VARIABLE=`sed -n '8800p' FILE`

-jim

To add to above, if you want to have output assigned to a variable then you can modify the line
head -$linenumber $filename|tee temp.txt|tail -1 temp.txt

& replace with this

line=`head -$linenumber $filename|tee temp.txt|tail -1 temp.txt`
echo $line

so the whole script would look like---->
echo "Enter line number to print:\c"
read linenumber
echo "Enter Filename:\c"
read filename
echo "File is $filename and line is $linenumber"
count=`cat $filename|wc -l`
if test $linenumber -gt $count
then
echo "You entered line number $linenumber, while file has total $count lines"
exit
else
echo "Line is :"
line=`head -$linenumber $filename|tee temp.txt|tail -1 temp.txt`
echo $line
rm -rf temp.txt
fi