As you can see, the cat command simply outputs the contents
of the file. If the file is longer than the available screen space, then
the file will simply print passed the bottom of the screen. This can be a
problem if you are interested in the initial contents of the file that has
become invisible.
A solution to this problem is to use the "wc -l filename" command to find out
how many lines are in the file and if it is greater than the screen height, use one
of the other display utilities such as "pg" or "more" that we will
discuss in just a bit. |
Some UNIX systems also include the "tac" utility
which behaves exactly like "cat" except that it displays the file in reverse
order, from bottom to top.
As with most utilities, the "cat" utility has several
useful options that are explored in the table below:
Option |
Explanation |
-e |
newlines are preceded by a dollar sign is combined with -v |
filelist |
A list of files that may be concatenated. |
-s |
Messages about files being unreadable are censored |
-t |
Displays tabs and form feeds if combined with the -v option. |
-u |
Output is unbuffered |
-v |
Displays control characters in the file |
Give it a try, Go ahead and "cat" a file.
The "more" Utility
The "more" utility is much like cat except that
it displays the contents of a file screen by screen. As each screen
concludes, the utility will query the user for the next screen.
Thus, more is much better at reading through larger files. Take a look at
the following example
As usual, the more utility comes with several
options and arguments and follows the generic form of
more [options] [+linenumber] [+/pattern] filelist
The options are explained in the following
table
Option |
Explanation |
-c |
Does not clear the screen before displaying a new one
but redraws line by line |
-d |
prompts the user to "hit space to continue". |
-f |
Displays according to logical lines (wrapping lines are not counted)
instead of screen lines |
-l |
Ignores ^L |
-n |
Sets the number of lines per screen size to n. |
-r |
Displays carriage returns as ^M |
-s |
Drops multiple occurrences of blank lines. |
-w |
When the entire file is displayed, more will wait for user-prompted
quit rather than quitting itself. |
+/pattern |
Begins at the first occurrence of the specified string. |
+linenumber |
The line of the file to begin at |
It is also common to see more used at
the end of a pipeline when the utilities involved may produce
output greater than the length of a screen. For example,
to restrict the listing of a full directory, you might use the more
utility in a pipeling such as in the following example:
ls -l | more
By the way, Some UNIX systems also include the "less"
utility that behaves exactly like "more" except that it displays the
file in reverse order, from bottom to top.
Give it a try, go ahead and use "more" to read a file.
The "pg" Utility
The "pg" utility works just like the more command
with some of its own options.
The "head" Utility
The "head" utility prints out the first number of specified
lines of a given file and follows the basic syntax of.
head -lines filelist
The "tail" Utility
The "tail" utility prints out the last number of specified
lines of a given file and follows the basic syntax of.
tail -lines filelist
Check out the following example
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