Reading files

Reading a file

cat prints a file's contents straight to the screen:

cat poem.txt

It is named after "concatenate" — it can also join several files together.

Just the start or end

For a long file you often want only a peek:
head shows the first lines, tail shows the last lines.

head -n 2 poem.txt
tail -n 1 poem.txt

The -n option chooses how many lines.

Use cat to print the whole contents of poem.txt.

# show the poem

Click Run to see the output here.

How many lines does the poem have? Use wc -l poem.txt to count them.

# count the lines of poem.txt

Click Run to see the output here.

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