Lesson 13: Viewing files with cat

The cat command displays the contents of the file (or files) and then returns you to the command prompt. We will use the echo command to put some text in a file and then view it:

[learner planets]$ echo "Earth is the only planet in the solar system that has life." > earth.txt
[learner planets]$ cat earth.txt
Earth is the only planet in the solar system that has life.

Using the redirection operand >, we can redirect the quoted text to a file.

Warning

The redirection operand > will overwrite any existing file of the same name.

Without redirection, the output of echo will have been displayed on the terminal:

[learner planets]$ echo "everything is awesome"
everything is awesome

You can use cat to quickly combine multiple files or, if you wanted to, make a copy of an existing file:

[learner planets]$ cat earth.txt > earth.txt.bak