Get first line of a shell command's output

Yes, that is one way to get the first line of output from a command.

If the command outputs anything to standard error that you would like to capture in the same manner, you need to redirect the standard error of the command to the standard output stream:

utility 2>&1 | head -n 1

There are many other ways to capture the first line too, including sed 1q (quit after first line), sed -n 1p (only print first line, but read everything), awk 'FNR == 1' (only print first line, but again, read everything) etc.

I would use:

awk 'FNR <= 1' file_*.txt

As @Kusalananda points out there are many ways to capture the first line in command line but using the head -n 1 may not be the best option when using wildcards since it will print additional info. Changing 'FNR == i' to 'FNR <= i' allows to obtain the first i lines.

For example, if you have n files named file_1.txt, ... file_n.txt:

awk 'FNR <= 1' file_*.txt

hello
...
bye

But with head wildcards print the name of the file:

head -1 file_*.txt

==> file_1.csv <==
hello
...
==> file_n.csv <==
bye