Introduction

Introduction

There are a variety of ways to get the contents of a file on screen. Most people seem to agree that less is the most versatile paginator; consequently, you rarely see the others these days. Also included here are a few of the more specialized text display programs (e.g., tac, rev) that come in handy from time to time.

The commands covered in this section are designed to display the contents of an ASCII file, in whole or in part, to the screen. They include

cat

Send contents of a file to standard output.

head

Display the top of a file to standard output.

less

Display a file, with scrolling.

look

Display lines that begin with a given string.

rev

Display lines from last character to first.

tac

Display lines in reverse order.

tail

Display the bottom of a file to standard output.

 



Linux Desk Reference
Linux Desk Reference (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 0130619892
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 174
Authors: Scott Hawkins

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