select the second line to last line of a file
To print all lines but first and last ones you can use this awk as well:
awk 'NR==1 {next} {if (f) print f; f=$0}'This always prints the previous line. To prevent the first one from being printed, we skip the line when NR is 1. Then, the last one won't be printed because when reading it we are printing the penultimate!
Test
$ seq 10 | awk 'NR==1 {next} {if (f) print f; f=$0}'23456789