Linux – Open only the first 10 lines of large CSV file in LibreOffice Calc

bashcsvlibreofficelibreoffice-calclinux

I will start receiving many large CSV files, of which only the first few lines are of interest to me. I was hoping to open them by piping only the first few lines to Calc, but this doesn't work:

$ libreoffice4.1 --calc <(head large_file.csv)

Upon trying this, I get a popup:

/dev/fd/63 does not exist.

Is there any easy way to open only the first few lines without creating a new (temporary) file? This is on Kubuntu Linux 12.10 with LibreOffice 4.1.

Best Answer

Instead of using an unnamed pipe, why not use a named pipe. For example:

% mknod p pipe
% (head large_file.csv > pipe &); libreoffice4.1 --calc pipe
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