Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1097242
Accepted
Scorch
Asked: 2018-11-30 12:05:49 +0800 CST

How to see the contents of a file without using a text editor [duplicate]

  • 772

I'm wondering how to read the contents of a file, for instance, I have a text file containing the words hello world and I want to read this file without using a text editor. What can I do?

files

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    There are number of commands which you can use to read the file in terminal without using a text editor. My favorites are "less" & "more". You can also use cat as suggested by Scorch.

    Uses: 

    more <file_name>
less <file_name>
cat <file_name>

    You can also check man pages for more details.

    • 3

  2. I use the command cat for this.. Ok so here are the contents of hello.txt:

    Hello World

    Now you open terminal and cd into the directory in which hello.txt is located and type cat hello.txt and the output will (or should) be: Hello World.

    • 1