Hi, I have a file containing 556,247 lines in it. I would like to extract the lines from 200,000 to 300,000. How do I acheive this using a single sed or awk command? Can some one help? Thanks, Balaji.

This sed command prints the first 13 lines: sed -n '1,13p' datafile I've never tried to edit a file this large before: sed -n '200000,300000p' datafile > newdatafile It'll be interested see if it works. Of course, you could do it with awk: awk ' { if (NR > 300000 ) exit if ( NR > 200000) print $0 } ' datafile Then again, maybe you should let the shell do it: #!/bin/ksh cnt=0 while read line do ((cnt+=1)) if [[ $cnt -gt 300000 ]] then break fi if [[ $cnt -gt 200000 ]] then echo "$line" fi done < data > newfile Any way will take awhile