delete a specific line

You can delete a specific line from any file or stream using sed.

sed '10d' will delete line 10 of a file or stream.

Using sed on a file, the -i flag will replace the contents of the file in-place. If you specify an extension after the -i flag, it will back up the file to a copy with that extension.

I used this recently when attempting to build a db dump from wikipedia. The sql dumps from mysql version 4.1.x have a line like '-----------' on line 4 of the dump. My version of mysql apparently requires a newer sql spec which requires a space after the first two dashes in order to be a legitimate comment, so it was failing to parse the dump.

The complete command I used, including using pv to add a progress bar:

pv enwiki-20090306-redirect.sql.gz | gunzip -c - | sed '4d' | mysql wikipedia