Linux® Desk Reference, Second Edition

Introduction

There are a variety of ways to get the contents of a file on screen. Most people seem to agree that less is the most versatile paginator; consequently, you rarely see the others these days. Also included here are a few of the more specialized text display programs (e.g., tac, rev) that come in handy from time to time.

The commands covered in this section are designed to display the contents of an ASCII file, in whole or in part, to the screen. They include

cat	Send contents of a file to standard output.
head	Display the top of a file to standard output.
less	Display a file, with scrolling.
look	Display lines that begin with a given string.
rev	Display lines from last character to first.
tac	Display lines in reverse order.
tail