Linux Cat

Do you know what the cat command does in Linux? It has some really nice options. I'll use the command ls to view files and directories in my local directory. I'm currently in home/david. Printwork directory shows me that there are no files at the moment. These are all directories. I'll clear the screen. What I can do is use echo to echo text to the screen or to a file. My cat's name is. And then I'm going to push that to a file called file one. So now if I cat that file. So cat file one. You can see the output of the file is my cat's name is. So cat allows me to print the output of that file to the screen as an example. It shows the full file. Now what I can do is say echo let's say garfield and I'll push that to a file called file 2. So now if I use cat to see the contents of that file and I need to specify the file name properly cat file two you can see the output is garfield but what I can do now is say cat file one file two and that concatenates the output of both of those files. So my cat's name is Garfield. Now something to be careful with with regards to cat is it shows you the entire file in one go. So if I type man ls and point that to a file, let's say file 3 and then type cat file 3, cat is going to show the entire contents of file 3 in one go. If I scroll up now, you can see that that file contains a lot of information. It doesn't allow me to see one line or one page at a time. It simply shows me the entire file. That works well when say the file is small like this file. That may be a problem when the file is very large like file 3 and then I have to go back to see all the contents. So you may prefer to use a command like more which shows you one page at a time. So notice if I press spacebar it's showing me one additional page at a time. A lot of people will actually prefer the commander less because that gives you more options. So less file three. I can go back and forward through the file using up and down arrows as an example. I can also search for keywords. So, just something to remember. Cat is great for certain files like cat file one. One of the great things about Linux is you have lots of options. And then what I could do is say cat file one, file two, and let's put that into let's say a file called file 4. And now if I cat file four, you can see the output of both file one and file two are in that file. So hopefully you've learned something. Let me know in the comments what other cool things you do with the cat command.