head is a program on Unix and Unix-like operating systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data.

The command syntax is:

By default, head will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output.

This displays the first 5 lines of all files starting with foo:

Many early versions of Unix and Plan 9 did not have this command, and documentation and books used sed instead:

The example prints every line (implicit) and quit after the fifth.

Equivalently, awk may be used to print the first five lines in a file:

However, neither sed nor awk were available in early versions of BSD, which were based on Version 6 Unix, and included head.