20 Basic Linux Cat Command for File Management with Examples

In Linux operating system most of the configuration files, logs even shell scripts are in text file format. There is why we have numbers of text editors in Linux. When you just need to see the content of those files, you can use a simple command named cat.

From cat manual page it says

cat is a command that concatenate files and print on the standard output

Cat is built-in command in Linux. I believe that all of Linux distribution has this Cat command by default. Let’s start to use how to use it.

1) View the content of file

The easiest way to use cat is just type ‘cat file_name’.

# cat /etc/issue

CentOS release 5.10 (Final)
Kernel \r on an \m

2) Put the line number on the fly

When reading a configuration file it may that you have a long configuration file. It will be easier to if you can put line numbers on the fly. Use -n parameter to fulfill this purpose.

# cat -n /etc/ntp.conf

1 # Permit time synchronization our time resource but do not
2 # permit the source to query or modify the service on this system
3 restrict default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery
4 restrict -6 default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery
5
6 # Permit all access over the loopback interface. This could be
7 # tightened as well, but to do so would effect some of the
8 # administration functions
9 restrict 127.0.0.1
10 restrict -6 ::1

3) Number non-blank output lines

Similar with -n parameter, -b parameter will give you numbers on the fly. The difference is -b parameter will only number non-blank lines.

#cat -b /etc/ntp.conf

1 # Permit time synchronization our time resource but do not
2 # permit the source to query or modify the service on this system
3 restrict default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery
4 restrict -6 default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery

5 # Permit all access over the loopback interface. This could be
6 # tightened as well, but to do so would effect some of the
7 # administration functions
8 restrict 127.0.0.1
9 restrict -6 ::1

4) Avoid multiple blank space

-s option squeeze multiple blank lines in the file. ie not more than one blank line

# cat -s welcome
Permit time synchronization our time resource but do not

permit the source to query or modify the service on this system
restrict default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery
restrict -6 default kod nomodify notrap nopeer noquery

Permit all access over the loopback interface. This could be
tightened as well, but to do so would effect some of the
administration functions
restrict 127.0.0.1

restrict -6 ::1
tightened as well, but to do so would effect some of the
#

5) Show tabs

You may need to know where are the tabs on your text file. If you do, you can use -T parameter. Tab will be represented by ^I characters.

# cat -T /etc/hosts

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1^I^Ilocalhost.localdomain localhost
::1^I^Ilocalhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

6) Show the end of lines

-E parameter will display $ at end of each line. Here’s the example :

# cat -E /etc/hosts

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs$
# that require network functionality will fail.$
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost$
::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6$

7) Show All

If you want to combine between -T and -E, you can use -A parameter.

# cat -A /etc/hosts

# Do not remove the following line, or various programs$
# that require network functionality will fail.$
127.0.0.1^I^Ilocalhost.localdomain localhost$
::1^I^Ilocalhost6.localdomain6 localhost6$

8) View the content per page

When your file can not fit in your screen, you can combine cat with another command to make it displayed per page. Use the pipe ( | ) sign to combine it.

# cat /proc/meminfo | less

# cat /proc/meminfo | more

The difference between less and more is that you can do scroll up and scroll down on less command using PageUp and PageDown buttons. While you can only do scroll down on more command using spacebar.

9) View the contents of 2 files

Let’s say we have 2 text files named linux and desktop located in /root folder. Each of files contains :

Linux : ubuntu, centos, redhat, mint and slackware
Desktop : gnome kde, xfce, enlightment, and cinnamon

When you want to view more than 1 file simultaneously, you do like this :

# cat /root/linux /root/desktop

ubuntu
centos
redhat
mint
slackware
gnome
kde
xfce
enlightment
cinnamon

10) Sorting file

Again, you can combine cat using another command to make a custom output. If you want to sort it, you can combine it with sort command. Here’s the example :

# cat /root/linux | sort

centos
mint
redhat
slackware
Ubuntu

11) Redirect standard output

You can also redirect the output to screen or to another file. Just use > sign (greater-than symbol) if you want to redirect the output into a file.

# cat /root/linux > /root/linuxdistro

The above command will create a linuxdistro file that has the same content with /root/linux file. Refer another example of redirection for multiple files.

# cat F1
welcome1
# cat F2
welcome2
# cat F3
welcome3

# cat F1 F2 F3 > F4
# cat F4
welcome1
welcome2
welcome3
#

12) Creating a new file

There are some ways to create a text file in Linux. One of them is using cat command.

# cat > operating_system

Unix
Linux
Windows
MacOS

When you type cat > operating system, it will create a file which named operating_system. Then you will see a blank line below the cat command. You can type the content that you want. We typed Unix, Linux, Windows and MacOS for example. When you’re done, press Ctrl-D to save the content and exit from cat command. You will see a file named operating_system is created in the current folder with the content that you add before.

13) Append the content of file

If you use the > sign twice, it means that the content of the first file will be added to the second file. Let’s see the example :

# cat /root/linux >> /root/desktop

# cat /root/desktop

The first cat command will add the content of /root/linux to /root/desktop file
The second command will show you this output :

ubuntu
centos
redhat
mint
slackware
gnome
kde
xfce
enlightment
cinnamon

14) Redirect standard input

You can also redirect standard input using < sign (less-than symbol).

# cat < /root/linux

The above command means that /root/linux will be an input for cat command. The output will be like this :

ubuntu
centos
redhat
mint
slackware

To make it clearer, let’s see another example :

# cat < /root/linux | sort > linux-sort

That command will be read : sort content from /root/linux file then print the output to linux-sort file

So the output of linux-sort file will be like this :

centos
mint
redhat
slackware
ubuntu

That’s some examples of cat command on day-to-day operation. Of course you can explore more detail from cat manual page and experiment with Input-Output redirection operator.

15) Read Content until a Specific Pattern

When you are reading from stdin, you can read until a line that contains a specific pattern. In the example below, the block of lines are read from stdin (until EOF) and printed on the standard output.

# cat <<EOF

> Redhat

> Ubuntu

> EOF

And the Output of the above will be :

Redhat
Ubuntu

Article updated on 26/Jan/2015 with few more examples.

16) Display File Content in Reverse

This is really not a cat command example, but it is related. tac is the reverse of cat. As you can imagine, tac will just display the contents of a file in reverse order (lines from bottom is displayed first). For example, the file /root/linux is being displayed in reverse as:

# tac /root/linux
slackware
mint
redhat
centos
ubuntu

17) Printing Files

You can put the standard output from cat command to a printer as its input, type the following command:

# cat linoxide.txt &gt; /dev/lp

Here, /dev/lp is a printing device.

18) Display All Files With Wildcard

Combine cat command with linux wildcard character to view the texts of the files at once in the current directory.

# cat *

Here, the above command will show all the texts inside every files in the current directory.

or

# cat *.txt

Here, the above command will show all the texts of every files having extension .txt in the current directory.

19) Joining Binary Files

You can concatenate binary files too. In old days most ftp / http downloads were limited to 2GB. Sometime to save bandwidth files size were limited to 100MB. You can combine such files with cat easily by running the below command:

# cat file1.bin file2.bin file3.bin > large.tar.gz

Here, the above command concatenates file1.bin, file2.bin, file3.bin to a single large.tar.gz .

Now, to extract it type the following tar command :

# tar -zxvf large.tar.gz

20) Testing Audio Device

You can send files to sound devices such as /dev/dsp or /dev/audio to make sure sound output and input is working. You can do that by executing the below command:

# cat audio.au >/dev/audio

You can simply use the following command for recording voice sample and play back with it cat command:

# dd bs=8k count=4 </dev/audio >testing123.au
# cat testing123.au >/dev/audio

Caution cat command

Even cat looks very simple, we have seen lot of time linux users overwriting very important file using redirection command. Make sure the name of the file you are creating does not match the name of an existing file. If you plan to append make sure you use ">>" and not ">"

Important : Avoid this

# cat > /dev/sda

Read Also:

• Linux touch command - Why do we need to change Timestamp?
• 10 Practical Linux mv Commands - Moving or Rename File/Directory