Unix text file view

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Learn more. How can I display the contents of a text file on the command line? Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 5 months ago. Active 4 years ago. Viewed 1. Improve this question. Sam Weinberg Sam Weinberg 2, 2 2 gold badges 11 11 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. Just a reminder, the question is for Linux, for Windows you use type filename command — Hammad Khan.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Using cat Since your file is short, you can use cat. Using od If your file contains strange or unprintable characters, you can use od to examine the characters.

Improve this answer. Does less have any clear advantages over other pager programs like pg , or does it just boil down to personal preference? SamWeinberg: less has more features than pg. Take a look at the less 1 and pg 1 manpages. There are other pagers as well. We are passing this file through a xml parser. But we are getting some control characters from input file and XML parser is failing for the control character in file.

Hidden control characters in a Unix Text File! Can anyone seem to know how to find out whether a UNIX text file has 'hidden' control characters? Can I view them using 'vi' by some command line options? Your intelletual answers are Identifying and removing control characters in a file. What is the best method to identify an remove control characters in a file. Would it be easier to do this in Unix or in C. RedHat Commands. OpenSolaris Commands. Linux Commands. SunOS Commands. FreeBSD Commands.

Full Man Repository. Advanced Search. Contact Us. However, the cat has very limited functionality and does not allow you see the content by page or pause the output. It works best for small files. When using it for files with large amounts of content, it tends to scroll off very fast. Sometimes, you just want to see only a part of the content and not the entire file content.

The head command allows you to print out just the start or beginning lines of the file. You can use the command line option -n or —lines to specify how many lines of content you want to display. The tail command is a variation of the head command in that it will display the last lines of the files, rather than the beginning. It has a pager like functionality and it displays content by screenful, one page at a time.

The more command has very limited functionality and most notably lacks the ability to navigate between the pages easily. It is quick and easy way to view file content by page. You can pipe the output of another program using more which allows you to view it more easily. It was developed as an attempt to fix the navigation deficiencies of more utility.