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3️⃣ Viewing File Contents

These commands allow you to read and analyze the contents of text files.

  • cat file.txt → Displays the entire content of file.txt directly in the terminal. This is suitable for smaller files.

  • less longfile.txt → Opens longfile.txt in a scrollable viewer. You can navigate through the file using the arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down, and quit by pressing q. This is useful for large files.

  • head -10 file.txt → Shows the first 10 lines of file.txt. You can replace 10 with any number to display a different number of lines.

  • tail -10 file.txt → Shows the last 10 lines of file.txt. Similar to head, you can change the number of lines displayed. tail -f file.txt is particularly useful for monitoring log files in real-time as new lines are added.

📌 Example:

Display the Linux distribution information and the first 5 lines of the system log file:

cat /etc/os-release
head -5 /var/log/syslog