Conclusion

You've looked at four commands in this chapter: cat, less, head, and tail. They all show you text files in read-only mode, but they do so in different ways. The cat command shows you the whole file all at once, while less allows you to page through a file one screen at a time. The head and tail commands are two sides of the same coinor, rather, the same fileas the former enables you to view the beginning of a file and the latter displays the end. Together, these four commands make it easy to view just about any part of a text file that you might need to see.