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Asked: 2026-06-17T08:12:22+00:00

I would like to read only the first 8 characters of a text file

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I would like to read only the first 8 characters of a text file and save it to a variable in bash. Is there a way to do this using just bash?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You can ask head to read a number of bytes. For your particular case:

    $ head -c 8 <file>

    Or in a variable:

    foo=$(head -c 8 <file>)
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