There are many ways to view files in GNU/Linux. One of the simplest command line tools for viewing files is cat. The cat command, short for concatenate, is actually intended for joining multiple files into one, but it works equally well for viewing text files.

In today's post I'm going to show how to use the command line find program to search for files. There are certainly different GUI tools available in Linux, such as Beagle, to search for files. The advantage of many of these systems is that they index the files on your system so that the searching is rather fast.

Today I'm going to show you how to use the head and tail commands to view portions of text files. There are, of course, other commands that can be used to view text files. The cat command can be useful for viewing small text files while more and less can be good for larger files. But what if you're only interested in just the beginning or the end of a file? That's where head and tail come in.

One of the things you may find you want to do often from your command line is to view the contents of a text file. This could be to view the contents of some startup script or just one of your own basic configuration files like .bashrc or .bash_aliases. The command is simple to use.

I've shown previously how to use the more command to view text output. Today I'll show how to do the same thing with the less command. You can run the command simply by opening a terminal window and entering...

Understanding options that can be used with the Linux command cat. This command can be used to view, create, or join multiple text files together.

Reading files is no big deal with bash: you just redirect the input to the script or pipe the output of another command into the script, or you could do it inside the script if the file names are pre-determined. You could also use process substitution to pass in the open files (command pipelines actually) from the command line.

Sometimes you get a bunch of files that are named in an annoying way and you’d like to change the naming convention for all of them. Maybe you forgot to change the settings on your CD ripping software and it ended up creating a bunch of long file names that you don’t like.
The aptly named "rename" terminal command comes to the rescue and allows you to bulk rename files from the command line.

One of the things I like about Linux is the command line. I have used nautilus, konqueror, and thunar to manage files in Linux and these file managers are great for what they do. But there are times when one simply wants to find a file when working on the command line without having to open a GUI application.