> Well, no, you can do exactly that in a single line with tail, head, split and cat.

You can't, because csv records may span multiple lines. So dicing them with standard tools may subtly break them. Unless you know your particular CSV data only has single line records.

(I take your broader point though. It's just that CSV is a bad example, because you usually wind up needing specialized tools to deal with them. It's likely that your PHP script would actually be more correct!)