removing first n and last n lines from multiple text files

Question

I have been stuck for some time now

I have two text files, from which I would like to remove the first two and the last three lines.

So far I have

$tail -n +3 text_1.txt text_2.txt | head -n -3

When I enter this into console, I see that text_2.txt indeed comes out with proper format, but text_1.txt still has that last three lines that need to be removed. I presume that head command is not being applied to text_1.txt.

How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

for i in text_1.txt text_2.txt; do tail -n +3 "$i" |  head -n -3; done