Learn Enough Developer Tools to Be Dangerous: Command Line, Text Editor, and Git Version Control Essentials

Chapter 3

Inspecting Files

Having seen how to create and manipulate files, now it’s time to learn how to examine their contents. This is especially important for files too long to fit on a single screen. In particular, we saw starting in Section 2.1 how to use the cat command to dump the file contents to the screen, but this doesn’t work very well for longer files.

3.1 Downloading a File

To give us a place to start, rather than creating a long file by hand (which is cumbersome) we’ll download a file from the Internet using the powerful curl utility. Sometimes written as “cURL”, the curl program allows us to interact with a URL¹at the command line. Although it’s not part of the core Unix command set, the curl command is widely available for ...