cat

Print a file to the terminal

What it does

cat prints a whole file. Good for short ones: a config, README.md, .env.example. Give it several files and it prints them one after another, hence the name, from concatenate.

For long files, less (page by page) or head and tail (the start and the end) work better. The output of cat is often passed on through a pipe, for example into grep.

Syntax

cat <file>…

Examples

• Print the contents of README.md to the terminal

  cat README.md

  • cat — print the whole file
  • README.md — file

Related commands

• less — Read a big file page by page
• head — Show the first lines of a file
• grep — Find the lines with some text in files

Practise · All commands