Yesterday a situation came up where someone needed me to separate out the tail end of a file, specified as being everything after a particular string (for sake of argument, “FOO”). I needed to do this immediately so went with the option that I knew would work and disregarded The Right Way or The Best Way, and went with the following:
grep -n FOO FILE.TXT | cut -f1 -d":" | xargs -I{} tail -n +{} FILE.TXT > NEWFILE.TXT
The thing that bugged me about this was the use of xargs for a singleton value. I thought that I could go flex my Google-Fu on this but was interested to see what sort of things people out in SO-land came up with for this situation
is what occurs to me right off.