[hoytech]

Not sure how standard it is, but at least on linux you can do "head -3" as a short-cut for "head -n 3". Same with tail.

[techbio]

I habitually type

     (head|tail) -33

to quickly fill the terminal window with text.

Edit: that | is an OR not a pipe.

[indigodaddy]

Yes I do the same because in fact on Solaris 10/11, only -X works. There is no -n switch. So I believe -X is more reliable across unixes.

[seanhunter]

That's the old school unix way. "-n" was introduced with POSIX iinvmm