I work with a bunch of data that often comes in text files. I regularly want to cut off the header / first line, but I thought that to use tail you had to know how many lines are in your file. It turns out that if you just use
$ tail -n +2 [file]
it will just skip the first line without forcing you to know how many lines there are.
earl $ cat a.csv 1 2 3 4 earl $ tail -n +2 a.csv 2 3 4
This is much more convenient for piping into awk or other commands downstream.
Shorter:
$ sed 1d a.csv