Viewing a file in unix

There is also more command which was used in olden days but less command has more friendly features. This is why you might come across the humorous term 'less is more'. Head command is another way of viewing text file but with a slight difference. The head command displays the first 10 lines of a text file by default. You can change this behavior by using options with head command but the fundamental principle remains the same: head command starts operating from the head beginning of the file.

Tail command in Linux is similar and yet opposite to the head command. While head command displays file from the beginning, the tail command displays file from the end. Head and Tail commands can be combined to display selected lines from a file.

You can also use tail command to see the changes made to a file in real time. I promised to show only the commands for viewing text file. And this one deals with both text and binary files. If the binary file consists of actual readable text, strings command displays those text on your screen.

You can use the file command to find the type of a file in Linux. My favorite command to open a file in Linux is the less command. It leaves the screen clear and has several options that makes viewing text file a lot easier.

Since you now know ways to view files, maybe you would be interested in knowing how to edit text files in Linux. Cut and Paste are two such commands that you can use for editing text in Linux terminal. You may also read about creating files in Linux command line.

Please enter at least 3 characters 0 results found. Abhishek Prakash. Here are five commands that let you view the content of a file in Linux terminal. Table of Contents.

You covered it and I missed it somehow. Ashish August 12, , am. Great post, very useful article. Ronald August 12, , am. Koen De Jaeger August 13, , am.

Ramesh Natarajan August 14, , am. Robert, Sed can do lot of amazing things. Example 1 of this article is in that list. So, I can related to it. Ronald, Yeah. ShekarKCB August 24, , am. Nice Article, uses of head, tail, and sed were nicely covered.

Thanks for the same. Ted September 13, , am. The sed tip I will use for sure and I also like the tail -f grep. Thank you Ramesh. Any chance you will be posting your most useful sed commands from your note book at some time? Bipin May 6, , am. Brad July 14, , am. Is the following any better i. A nice and handy tutorial. Example 7: the letters M,N are reversed. Hello, How do I get all the lines between the first and last occurance of a string in a log file. Ankit September 16, , am.

Without OP providing additional information, an unstructured tool is the place to start. See my answer. And be warned that the term binary is used in two ways totally different in practice : "A binary file" means a file whose context is not pure ASCII-text.

I think UTF-8 is more likely, or some code page if the program thinks it seems to be encoded that way through huristics. Show 2 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. According to this answer by tyranid : hexdump -C yourfile. Update According to this answer by Emilio Bool : xxd does both binary and hexadecimal For bin : xxd -b file For hex : xxd file. Improve this answer. Michael Mrozek Rahul Rahul This really helped! Thank you — Shravya Boggarapu. Add a comment. Various people have answered some aspects of the query, but not all.

Compiled binary files are no different, they are stored as 1's and 0's. Some external reading. Community Bot 1. You may want to add that the characters that you see in a line of text as "1" or "0" are not stored as a single "1" or "0" by the computer; the OP seems to have a confusion about that. I would quibble i. I don't disagree, but at some point, all simple descriptions break down, the question is how far down the rabbit hole you go before you stop describing things simply.

At low level, a file is encoded as a sequence of 0's and 1's. But even programmers rarely go there in practice. Say I have 23 apples. If I make groups of ten apples, I will get: 2 groups of ten and 3 lone apples. That's exactly what we mean when we write 23 : a 2 tens , then a 3 units. That's why data and programs, seen as numbers, are written and manipulated in their binary form.

Thomas Dickey Thomas Dickey But I thought computer can only read 1's and 0's. Can I see those? I'm trying to understand how computers work — Martin Zeltin. That alone won't help you much. If you want to learn how exactly it works, then on a Linux box have a look at the ELF file format, and en. If you just want to see the code that gets generated by the compiler have a look at running it with gdb. Since you want to get more "low level" check out nand2tetris.

The OP asked how do I open it to see the 1's and 0's that are there? This answer should have been a comment, then it would have been fine. Joe Yes, I do not question the strings command usefulness, just the fact it doesn't answer the OP question here. Gilles Castel Gilles Castel 3 3 bronze badges. Lorenz Leitner Lorenz Leitner 3 3 bronze badges. Other people have mentioned this.