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Linux Basics

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Seeing Inside File - cat, tail, head

To see what is inside a text file, you can use either cat, tail or head command.

Using cat you can see the whole content of the file:

cat myfirstfile_copy.txt

Do not use this command to look inside a huge file. For the huge file, you can use the more command which would display the content of a file in a paginated way:

more myfirstfile_copy.txt

tail shows you the last few lines of a file

tail myfirstfile_copy.txt

By default tail shows you only last 10 lines, you can change it using the command line option. For example, to see the last 20 lines, you can use

tail -20 myfirstfile_copy.txt

We can use the -f option with tail for displaying newly appended lines of a continuously growing file. This option is mainly used to monitor the growth of log files. So, the console will keep on displaying the new lines as soon as there will be an update in the file.

tail -f access.log

To terminate it, press Ctrl + C.

If you are interested in the first few lines, you can use the head command. By default head shows you only first 10 lines, you can change it using the command line option. For example, to see the first 20 lines, you can use

head -20 myfirstfile_copy.txt

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