"Dogs" of the linux shell

## (1) displays the first 6 lines of a file
head -6 readme.txt

## (2) displays the last 25 lines of a file
tail -25 mail.txt

# (3) Here's an example of using head and tail in concert to display the 11th through 20th line of a file.
head -20 file | tail -10

## (4) display ongoing updates to the given
## log file
tail -f /usr/tmp/logs/daemon_log.txt

Imagine that a daemon process was continually appending activity logs to the /usr/adm/logs/daemon_log.txt file. Using tail -f at a console window, for example, will more or less track all updates to the file in real time. (The -f option is applicable only when tail's input is a file).
If you give multiple arguments to tail, you can track several log files in the same window.
## track the mail log and the server error log
## at the same time.
tail -f /var/log/mail.log /var/log/apache/error_log