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  • Nice trick! It's also possible to count lines from the end, for instance (echo '$-4,$d'; echo wq ) | ed input.txt deletes the last 5 lines. See also the line addressing section of the manual. Commented Mar 10, 2015 at 6:48
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    However, I think ex (elvis 2.2.0) is better for large files: CPU-bound, few KB of memory used. ed (1.6) run out of memory (over 2 GB memory used) over my 9 GB file. Which explains why you said to use sed or perl for files of unlimited size. ;-) Commented Mar 10, 2015 at 12:20
  • Good point, ex is a more robust line-oriented editor, and it accepts a superset of ed commands (in particular, it understands 10,31d and wq as given above). Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 9:34
  • I was optimistic to see this answer but ran into the same problem as unix.stackexchange.com/questions/66730/… Commented Apr 22, 2021 at 20:37
  • Actually, since my file is only 1.4 G, I then tried your first approach, and that worked. +1. Thanks! Commented Apr 22, 2021 at 20:48