Unix commands view file contents

It leaves the screen clear and has several options that makes viewing text file a lot easier. Since you now know ways to view files, maybe you would be interested in knowing how to edit text files in Linux.

Cut and Paste are two such commands that you can use for editing text in Linux terminal. You may also read about creating files in Linux command line. Please enter at least 3 characters 0 results found. Abhishek Prakash. Here are five commands that let you view the content of a file in Linux terminal. Table of Contents. Cat This is the simplest and perhaps the most popular command to view a file in Linux. Less Less command views the file one page at a time. Head Head command is another way of viewing text file but with a slight difference.

Tail Tail command in Linux is similar and yet opposite to the head command. By default, tail command displays the last 10 lines of a file. Bonus: Strings command Okay! Strings command displays the readable text from a binary file. Which command do you prefer? This is useful for creating scripts , text files containing one or more commands that are run consecutively. In later tutorials, you will use these techniques to automate your analyses, which can save enormous amounts of time.

You can display the contents of a file using the cat command, which stands for concatenate. Use the command line to navigate to the Desktop, and then type cat myFile. This will print the contents of the file to your command line. This is the same idea as using the GUI to double-click on the text file to see its contents. Using the command line and the GUI to read the contents of a text file. On the left is the command line using the cat command, which prints the contents to the Terminal.

On the right is the contents of the file displayed after using the mouse to double-click the file. We refer to the output from this command as stdout , or standard output. The commands that are typed into the Terminal are called stdin , or standard input. For example, for a long listing of each file found, use:. For more, consult the Unix manual page by entering at the Unix prompt:.

This is document admm in the Knowledge Base. Last modified on Skip to: content search login. Knowledge Base Toggle local menu Menus About the team. You can use the ls command to list the files in any directory to which you have access. For a simple directory listing, at the Unix prompt, enter:. This command will list the names of all the files and directories in the current working directory. Neither the options nor the filename are required you may use ls by itself to see all the files in a directory.

You may have multiple options and multiple filenames on a line. The options available with ls are far too numerous to list here, but you can see them all in the online manual man pages. The options can be combined.