Question

I am looking for a way to remove the first 3 lines of text from a CSV file, lets call report.csv, with a batch script.

My CSV contains 3 header lines

ReportName
Time
<blank line>

does anyone know how i can accomplish this and just replace the original file?

Answer 1

As long as you have a true CSV, and not a tab delimited file, then the following should work. (any tabs will be converted into 8 spaces)

@echo off
set "csv=test.csv"
more +3 "%csv%" >"%csv%.new"
move /y "%csv%.new" "%csv%" >nul

If your file does contain tabs, and you don’t need to preserve empty lines, then the following will work, but it is slower.

@echo off
set "csv=test.csv"
>"%csv%.new" (
  for /f skip^=3^ usebackq^ delims^=^ eol^= %%A in ("%csv%") do echo %%A
)
move /y "%csv%.new" "%csv%" >nul