Well, head just reads lines. A CSV row can optionally be multiple lines.

Also head doesn't do anything with the data or the format, aside from printing line by line, so doesn't need to know any column names.

head reads CSV row that has multiple lines.

Miller is being offered as "like awk, sed, head.." (emphasis on head - mine) and yes it offers more, but it does not behave "like" the *nix tools it refers to.

Miller is designed around the idea of structured data. This is a higher bar than naively manipulating text, and the user has to be more deliberate to extract fields. Doing cli manipulation of a csv that contains quoted commas is challenging with the standard tools.

>head reads CSV row that has multiple lines.

It just reads lines, doesn't know anything about rows.

So if you want, say, the first 100 rows of a csv that has multiline rows, miller can give it, while head can't.

Head will just print the "N" first lines - whether those are 1, 22, 36 or N actual csv rows.

>Miller is being offered as "like awk, sed, head.." (emphasis on head - mine) and yes it offers more, but it does not behave "like" the nix tools it refers to.*

That's the whole idea.

That it behaves in a way more suited to the csv format, and more coherent than 5-6 different text-focused tools.

The claim is not "this is awk, sed, head, sort remade for csv with identical interfaces and behavior" but "this is a tool to work with csv files and do what you'd normally have to jump through hoops to do with awk, sed, head, sort which don't understand csv structure".

you could shorten to:

$ mlr -N --csv head -n 20 pp-2002.csv

-N is a shortcut for --implicit-csv-header and --headerless-csv-output