Mac OS® X Tiger™ Unleashed

Examining File Contents

Moving around the filesystem, and moving files around the filesystem, isn't all that interesting if you can't look at what's in the files. Unix provides a number of facilities for examining the contents of files, and frequently these are more convenient to use than their graphical counterparts. BBEdit, for example, is a wonderful text editor, and it's light enough in memory footprint to load quickly. However, if you want to see whether the file you're thinking about deleting is really the file you mean to delete, and the information is readily apparent by looking at the beginning of the text, there are much more efficient ways to examine the contents from the command line than starting up a GUI program just to glance at ...