I have a very long file which I want to print but skipping the first 1e6 lines for example. I look into the cat man page but I did not see any option to do this. I am looking for a command to do this or a simple bash program.
You'll need tail. Some examples:
$ tail great-big-file.log
< Last 10 lines of great-big-file.log >
If you really need to SKIP a particular number of "first" lines, use
$ tail -n +<N+1> <filename>
< filename, excluding first N lines. >
That is, if you want to skip N lines, you start printing line N+1. Example:
$ tail -n +11 /tmp/myfile
< /tmp/myfile, starting at line 11, or skipping the first 10 lines. >
If you want to just see the last so many lines, omit the "+":
$ tail -n <N> <filename>
< last N lines of file. >
If you have GNU tail available on your system, you can do the following:
tail -n +1000001 huge-file.log
It's the +
character that does what you want. To quote from the man page:
If the first character of K (the number of bytes or lines) is a `+', print beginning with the Kth item from the start of each file.
Thus, as noted in the comment, putting +1000001 starts printing with the first item after the first 1,000,000 lines.