Extract every Nth line from a Text File using Command Line

In this video, I use the command line tool awk to extract every third line from a captions.sbv file. This should work on Mac, Linux and Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Move to Desktop Folder

cd ~/Desktop

View File (hit q to exit)

less captions.sbv

Extract Every Third Line from captions.sbv

awk 'NR % 3 == 2' captions.sbv

‘3’ is for every third line.
‘2’ means start with the 2nd line.

Save Every Third Line to a Text File

awk 'NR % 3 == 2' captions.sbv > captions.txt

Convert Linefeeds to Spaces

awk 'NR % 3 == 2' captions.sbv |tr '\n' ' ' > captions.txt