Reading just a few lines from a text file

[rafi]

tkpmep at hotmail.com wrote:
> I have a text file with many hundreds of lines of data. The data of
> interest to me, however, resides at the bottom of the file, in the last
> 20 lines. Right now, I read the entire file and discard the stuff I
> don't need. I'd like to speed up my program by reading only the last 20
> lines. How do I do this?
> 
> Thomas Philips
> 

If you are using a Unix:

tail -20 file.txt

-- 
rafi

	"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
	                            (Albert Einstein)