Creating a File

Linux for Programmers and Users, Section 3.13.

Files may be created in several ways. The easiest is perhaps with the cat command.

$ cat > myfile
This is an example of how to use the cat command to add
plain text to a file.

<Ctrl-d>

Others ways to create a text file are to use a text editor such as vi or nano. If we are content with an empty file, the touch command also creates a file.

Viewing the Contents of Files

Three programs often used to view the contents of files: cat, more, and less. The later two are also refered to as pagers because they display the contents of a long file in a screen-by-screen manner. See also Viewing Contents of Text Files.

cat

Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output.

SYNOPSIS

cat [OPTION] [FILE] ...

-n, --number

number all output lines.

-s, --squeece-blank

never more than one single blank line

-t

equivalent to -vT

-T, --show-tabs

display TAB characters as ^I

-v, --show-nonprinting

use ^ and M- notation, except for TAB to display nonprinting characters