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.

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.

Are you interested in moving to Linux, but have no idea how the terminal works? Are you used to commands like “dir” in dos, but have no idea how to do them in Linux? Well, then this is the site for you. If you’ve just started University Computing Science, or if you’ve just started Linux on your job, this is a great guide to get you started with the basic commands.