Question

this command displays the second line of the file :

cat myfile | head -2 | tail -1

My file contains the following data :

hello
mark
this is the head line
this is the first line 
this is the second line 
this is the last line

the command above prints the data as: mark

But i am unable to understand this because, head -2 is used to print the first two lines and tail -1 prints the last line but how come 2nd line is printed!!???

Answer 1

tail displays the last line of the head output and the last line of the head output is the second line of the file.

Output of head (input to tail):

hello
mark

Output of tail:

mark