command: cat

[Rob]

The cat command will allow you to see an entire file in your terminal quickly. This is more useful for smaller files unless you're grepping for certain things.

 

[Rob]

cat command examples:

show the contents of /etc/passwd while searching for the user 'rob'

[[email protected] ~]# cat /etc/passwd|grep rob
rob:x:500:500::/home/rob:/bin/bash

 

[aq23Pf]

Cool

 

[captain-sensible]

apparently Richard Stallman was one of the major contributors to cat ; you can use it to open a file and output it to something else.I used it in a slackbuild like so:
cat $CWD/slack-desc > $PKG/install/slack-desc

 

[JasKinasis]

cat command examples:

show the contents of /etc/passwd while searching for the user 'rob'

[[email protected] ~]# cat /etc/passwd|grep rob
rob:x:500:500::/home/rob:/bin/bash

As this has been necro-posted and raised from the dead, I'll take this opportunity to point out that there is never a need to use cat file | grep pattern.

You can simply use grep or ag instead:

grep rob /etc/passwd

OR

ag rob /etc/passwd

ag (aka the silver searcher) - is basically a multithreaded grep on steroids - great for quickly searching through large files, or through code-bases where you have a lot of files!

Just sayin'!

 

[Rob]

wow, old post lol..

Even though I know i don't need to use 'cat file | grep something', i still do it every day from muscle memory haha.. could be i'm catting something, then just uparrow and add the grep to the end most of the time though.

 

[daysaputra]

I'm a beginner, where do I learn linux commands for beginners?

 

[Rob]

Hey there @daysaputra - welcome to the forum. You're in the right place.. there are some tutorials here and plenty of other articles and things to read. I wrote a little ebook (in my signature) that might help, but mainly try to use Linux as much as you can and things will start seeping in.

 

[captain-sensible]

hey @daysaputra this ism y philosophy- you can read as much fishing books as you like; you then have "head knowledge" . the way to get actual knowledge is just to do some actual fishing. Thus google for some linux command lines and just try them. One question do you have the means of trying linux command line ? Do you have access to any linux OS or Windows Subset for Linux (Windows 10). if not thats your first objective.

After that its just a case of opening a terminal window and stating with basics.

$ uname -r
$uname -m
$ pwd
$whoami

$ cd Desktop
$ ls --color

$ cd ~

$ cd Desktop

$ touch play.txt

$ nano play.txt






!
then your on your way :^)