Let’s say you’ve got a text file, of any size, big or small, and you want to remove every other line of that file, well here are a few commands in Linux that allow you to do this.
Example, you want to get from this:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
To this:
1
3
5
7
9
The sed way:
sed -n "p;N;" file.txt > newfile.txt
The awk way:
awk 'NR%2 != 0' file.txt > newfile.txt
Here you can actually specify N lines, replace 2 in the above command and you’ll be able to take out every N’th number. As an example, here’s the above replaced with a 3 on the file:
1
2
4
5
7
8
10
Easy as pie, right?