head is a program on Unix and Unix-like systems used to display the first few lines of a text file or piped data. The command-syntax is:
head [options] <file_name>
By default, head will print the first 10 lines of its input to the standard output. The number of lines printed may be changed with a command line option. The following example shows the first 20 lines of filename:
head -n 20 filename
This displays the first 5 lines of all files starting with foo:
head -n 5 foo*