Lesson7.Reading Files

Lesson 7. Reading Files

In this lesson we discuss how to read files located on your Unix system.

We will continue to learn about file management and continue to build upon the concepts learned in earlier lessons. In this lesson we will look at a few handy commands that will help you to read data within a file. That doesn't sound too exciting, now does it? Well, actually it is exciting, because if you haven't used Unix for file management before (or in a limited manner), you may not want to go back to anything else! In Unix, you have the power to look at large files in sections. For example, if you have a security log on your Unix system that must be read every morning, you can use a particular command to just look at the last entries in the log.

You know how to manage filesthat was the hard part to learn; now we just need to know how to read the data you have stored on your Unix system without a GUI-based text editing tool or a word processor. In this chapter we look at some helpful tools that take only a second to use and increase your productivity. You will be spending less time working within a cumbersome GUI, because you can just type a quick command like cat and have the information you need in seconds.