Text Processing

Linux excels at text processing. The philosophy of small, focused tools that can be chained together with pipes makes the command line extraordinarily powerful for working with text data, log files, configuration files, and more.

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Viewing File Contents

cat — Concatenate and Display

cat file.txt                    # display entire file
cat -n file.txt                 # display with line numbers
cat file1.txt file2.txt         # display multiple files concatenated

less and more — Paged Viewing

less /var/log/syslog            # scroll through a large file
more /var/log/syslog            # simpler pager (forward only)

less navigation:

Key	Action
Space / f	Forward one page
b	Back one page
/pattern	Search forward
?pattern	Search backward
n	Next search match
N	Previous search match
g	Go to start
G	Go to end
q	Quit

head and tail — View Start or End