Problem using multiple 'head' commands in shell script

[Tom Christiansen]

>From the keyboard of garyb at abekrd.UUCP (Gary Bartlett):

[various approaches including special versions of head and other
 nasties deleted, many complaining of being dog slow.]

:Thoughts?

I think this all a lot of unnecessary complexity; it's not that I 
think it impossible using tools from V6 UNIX, but it's more 
cumbersome and slow than it really needs to be.

Consequently, I offer to translate Gary's sed/sh/head/sort/blah script to
perl for him if he wants.  I promise it'll be faster, smaller, simpler,
and a lot more portable than writing a new version of head to do the job.

Sorry, one per customer please. :-)

--tom
--
"Hey, did you hear Stallman has replaced /vmunix with /vmunix.el?  Now
 he can finally have the whole O/S built-in to his editor like he
 always wanted!" --me (Tom Christiansen <tchrist at convex.com>)