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emulate tail with sed

I have a mini-system with only limited number of binaries (bash,cp,cat,sed, ...). I don't have tail command, and I am wondering if I could emulate tail functionality with sed

cat foo.txt | tail -n 10

I know that I can print lines 1-10 with sed cat foo.txt | sed -n '1,10p', but how would I print the last 10 lines?

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5
  • sed -e :a -e '$q;N;11,$D;ba' foo to match the question.
    – Slyx
    Commented Jan 1, 2014 at 10:04
  • I have no idea how it works, but it works perfectly. Thanks a lot.
    – Martin Vegter
    Commented Jan 1, 2014 at 10:13
  • 4
    Could someone explain this wonderful command ? I am looking to have one command that shows begginning and end of a document, and I think this command could help, but I need to add the head part. In fact, the command I was looking for is simply : sed -e '1,11p' -e :a -e '$q;N;11,$D;ba' But I'd still like to understand the tail part !!!
    – Franck
    Commented Jul 16, 2019 at 9:57
  • How might I alias sed -e :a -e '$q;N;11,$D;ba' in .bashrc? When I tried alias tsed="sed -e :a -e \'$q;N;4,$D;ba\'" it gives me: sed: -e expression #2, char 1: unknown command: `'' N: command not found 11,: command not found
    – John Smith
    Commented Apr 19, 2021 at 7:32
  • 2
    Can you add bit explanation to options used? Thanks
    – Pandya
    Commented Nov 11, 2021 at 18:45