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Rahul Mehta
Asked: 2011-09-15 21:57:15 +0800 CST

what this command will do

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Mistakenly i run this command 

cat /etc/*

want to know what it can effect on my Linux system

what i was wanted to see the distribution of my sytem so 

cat /etc/*-release

when i run this command it said that no such directory exist so tried the above command . and stopped the above command in between , does the above command cat /etc/* can do any bad effect .

linux command-line-interface

2 Answers

  1. It just reads through every file in /etc/ directory. Does not cause any harm, it's a read-only operation.

    To see what * actually expands to, try

    cd /etc
echo *
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  2. CAT Command: Allows you to look, modify or combine a file.

    But as per your above command nothing to worry.

    For to see the distribution info run

    $ cat /etc/issue

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