Command to open file in linux command line

How do I open a text file in my terminal?

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There is a file named RESULTS.txt and I want to open this file in my terminal. (I mean I want to see the file contents be displayed in the terminal and not in some text editor) How do I do that ?

@Sparksis When I search for «open a text file in a terminal» I get results from mac forums for things like pico, etc. which aren’t in ubuntu. This kind of question is very much welcome here.

You might want to look into some beginner Ubuntu shell tutorials — They will explain how to do this and related stuff.

16 Answers 16

directly shows a text file in the terminal.

lets you scroll and search ( / text to search Enter ) in the file; press q to exit.

cat /home/john/RESULTS.txt less /home/john/RESULTS.txt 

upon entering a command like cat /home/suhail/RESULT.txt I get this cat: /home/suhail/RESULT.txt: No such file or directory

If you’re in the same folder as the file, you don’t need to do the full path. You can just do cat RESULT.txt

@SuhailGupta: There might be more than one suhail directory. /home/suhail is normally your home directory. What does pwd print? Also, tab completion can be very convenient; if you type cat R , and there’s only one file in the current directory whose name starts with R , it will expand to the name of that file.

Another alternative is vim .

Once you opened a file with vim you can insert text by typing i , for instance. If you want to save your file use :w (write) or :q (quit) or :wq (for write and quit) or :q! (quit and do not save). Sometimes you need to hit the ESC key to be able to type the commands.

Vim requires some learning, but is widely used and it is very versatile.

Vim is an advanced text editor that provides the power of the de-facto Unix editor ‘Vi’ with a more complete feature set. Vim is often called a «programmer’s editor,» and is so useful for programming that many consider it an entire IDE. It’s not just for programmers, though. Vim is perfect for all kinds of text editing, from composing email to editing configuration files.

An even better alternative is view , which starts Vim in read-only mode on Ubuntu. And since the OP asked to view and explicitly not to edit . -1 . of course I will take back the downvote in case this gets edited.

@0xC0000022L 🙂 You can keep the downvote. Feel free to add an answer on view if you want to. Vim is perfectly capable of showing files and thus this answers the question.

I upvoted your comment first. Fine with me. But since you mentioned Vim, view would literally fit into your answer instead of a separate one. I still think that and not in some text editor is pretty clear 😉

view is a dumb four letter alias for vim -R . If you don’t use any save command like ZZ , :w or 😡 , there is no difference. Also you can redirect files to vim to use it as a reader: command | vim — . This is usually better than less , the only downside being that vim snarfs the entire output before displaying anything.

@0xC0000022L: for someone fairly new to using the command line, “in the terminal and not in some text editor” could easily mean “in some utility within the terminal, not in some text editor that opens in a separate window”. When I first came to the command line, I was so used to identifying applications with their windows that I certainly thought of vim , nano , etc. as part of the terminal rather than as separate applications for quite a while.

all those are best ways and there is one more way to do this & that’s with head command.

both will give you the same input.

Head command Explanation:

Generally head command used to print the starting lines of the any text file.we can view the text file with

That will prints the 1st 10 lines of the above text file.

If you want to specific on the number of lines which are to be view then you can use head as

Then in the above text file first 20 lines will be viewed.

If you want to view whole file data with head means then then we can get it by

Hope that above explanation will give you some idea on usage of head.

This is just a really bad way to write cat . If that’s what this is meant to be, then there’s far more than this one more way to do it…

If the file is rather long, you might want to use

so that you can navigate through it with directional keys.

to print out the last 30 lines of a large file named result.txt .

It will show you the last ten lines of your_file . If a process appends something to this file, you see it on your terminal. man tail gives you more on tail .

It’s useful to see what happens with a server when you use this command on a log file.

Press Ctrl — C to quit when you are done viewing.

There are a lot of alternatives for doing that:

Some of these programs have a lot of parameters, so check that out with —help after the command..

• cat filename prints the whole file at once
• more / less filename similar behaviour for see the file in parts
• tail filename start reading from the tail of the file
• grep text filename for filtering results

Hope that some of this works for you..

With a terminal text editor: nano /path/to/file/RESULTS.txt

As we seem to be listing all available alternatives of displaying any text file in the terminal, it would be quite fun to introduce pv as technically one valid (but unusual) method, although I would normally use cat instead for most things.

It is in the repositories and so can be installed with sudo apt-get install pv if you don’t have it already.

As the man page notes, pv is very often used to

monitor the progress of data through a pipe. pv will copy each supplied FILE in turn to standard output (- means standard input), or if no FILEs are specified just standard input is copied. This is the same behaviour as cat(1).

With pv you can literally print the file to the screen, and choose the rate ( -L ) at which it appears. The example below uses a high rate (300), but if you choose a low rate such as -L 50 , it will appear as if the computer is typing out the file for you.

pv /etc/apt/sources.list -qL 300 

Needless to say you can increase the rate further ( -L 8000 ), and the command becomes very similar to cat , with the output appearing instantaneously.

For more information see man pv or the Ubuntu manpages online.

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How to open the file in bash

The file is used to store the data permanently and use the data in any script when requires. A file can be opened for reading, writing, or appending. Many bash commands exist to open a file for reading or writing, such as `cat`, `less`, `more` etc. Any text editor can be used to open a file in bash. nano, vim, vi, etc., an editor is used to open a file from the terminal. Many GUI editors also exist in Linux to open a file, such as Gedit, Geany, etc. The file can be opened for reading or writing by using bash script also. The ways to open a file for various purposes have been shown in this tutorial.

Open file using Bash commands:

The uses of shell commands to open a file for creating or reading are shown in this tutorial. The uses of `cat`, `less`, and `more` commands have shown here.

Use of `cat` command:

The `cat` is a very useful command of bash to create or display the file’s content. Any file type can be created easily and quickly by opening the file using the `cat` command with the ‘>’ symbol. Run the following `cat` command to open a file named file1.txt for writing. If the filename already exists, then the previous content of the file will be overwritten by the new content; otherwise, a new file will be created.

Add the following content to the file.

A bash script is a command-line interpreted language.
Many automated tasks can be done easily using a bash script.

Press Ctrl+D to finish the writing task. The following output will appear after creating the file.

Now, run the following `cat` command to open the file.txt file for reading.

The following output will appear after executing the above command.

Use of `less` command:

The `less` command is used to open a file for reading only. It is mainly used to read the content of the large file. The user can move backward or forward through the file by using this command. It works faster than other text editors.

Run the following command to open the file1.txt file for reading. Here, the content of the file is very small. So when the user presses the enter key, then the content will go upward. Press the character ‘q’ to return to the command prompt.

The following output will appear after opening the file using the `less` command and pressing the enter key.

Use of `more` command:

Like the `less` command, the `more` command is used to open a large file for reading only. This command is mainly used to read a file’s large content in multiple pages to help the readers read long files.

Run the following command to open the file1.txt file for reading by using the `more` command. It is a small file. So all content of the file has displayed on one page.

The following output will appear after opening the file using the `more` command.

Open file using command-line editors:

The uses of vi and nano command-line editors for opening the file to create and read have been shown in this part of this tutorial.

Use of vi editors:

One of the popular text editors of Linux is vi editors. It is installed on Ubuntu by default. The user can easily create, edit, and view any file by using this text editor. The advanced version of vi editors is called vim editor, which is not installed by default. This part of the tutorial shows how to use vi editor to open a file for creating and reading. Run the following command to open the file2.txt file for writing.

You have to press the character ‘i’ to start writing into the vi editor. Add the following content to the file.

Writing a file using vi editors.

You can do any of the following tasks after writing the content of the file.

1. Type :wq to quit the editor after saving the file.
2. Type :w to keep the file open in the editor after saving.
3. Type :q to quit the editor without saving the file.

The following output shows that ‘:wq’ has been typed to quit the editor after saving the file.

Run the following command to open the file2.txt file and check the content exists or not that was added in the file.

The following output shows that the file contains the data that was added before. Here,’:’ has typed to quit the editor.

Use of nano editor:

Another useful and popular editor of Linux is the nano editor that is used to open a file for writing and reading. It is easier to use than the vi editor and more user-friendly than other command-line editors. Run the following command to open the file3.txt file for writing using nano editor.

Add the following content to the file.

Writing a file using nano editor.

If you type Ctrl+X after adding the content to the file, it will ask you to save the file. The following output will appear if you press the character, ‘y’. Now, press the enter to quit the editor after saving the file.

Open file using GUI text editor:

The ways to use gedit and geany GUI-based text editor have shown in the part of this tutorial.

Use of gedit editor:

The gedit is mostly used GUI-based text editor that is installed by default on maximum Linux distributions. Multiple files can be opened by using this editor. Run the following command the open the existing file1.txt file using gedit editor.

The following output will appear after executing the command.

Use of geany editor:

Geany is a more powerful GUI-based editor than the gedit editor, and you have to install it to use it. It can be used to write code for many types of programming languages. Run the following command to install the geany editor.

After installing the editor, run the following command to open the file1.txt file.

The following output will appear after executing the command.

Conclusion:

Many ways to open a file for reading or writing have been shown in this tutorial by using bash command, command-line editors, and GUI-based editors. The Linux users can select any of the ways mention here to open a file in bash.

About the author

Fahmida Yesmin

I am a trainer of web programming courses. I like to write article or tutorial on various IT topics. I have a YouTube channel where many types of tutorials based on Ubuntu, Windows, Word, Excel, WordPress, Magento, Laravel etc. are published: Tutorials4u Help.

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