Linux command line read file

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 do I Open a Text File in Linux Terminal?

In Linux, the text files are created by different text editors such as nano and vim text editors. The touch command line utility can also be used to create the file. Similarly, various commands can be used to open a text file in Linux.

In this tutorial, different command line utilities have been discussed to open the text files in Linux using the terminal by covering the below-mentioned topics:

Method 1: Using the cat Command

To view the content of the text file, the most convenient and recommended command utility is the “cat” command utility which can be used:

To understand the usage of the above command, we will display the contents of the “MyFile.txt” using the cat command:

The contents of the file have been displayed.

Method 2: Using the more Command

The “more” command utility is similar to the less command utility. The only difference between both the commands is that more command leaves their output displayed on the screen without clearing it. Due to this reason, it is recommended to use the less command utility for opening files compared to the more command. The general syntax of using the more command in the Linux terminal is

For example, we will open the file “MyFile.txt” using the more command:

The output has been displayed on the screen of Linux.

Method 3: Using the nl Command

The “nl” command utility can also be used to open the text file, and its usage syntax of the command is:

The “nl” command is used to open the “MyFile.txt” using the command:

We can see in the above output, the lines have been displayed of the file with the line numbers.

Method 4: Using the xdg-open Command

The last command which can be used to open the text file in Linux is by using the “xdg-open” command utility. The general syntax of using the “xdg-open” command:

For example, we will understand its usage by opening the file:

The file has been opened in Linux.

Method 5: Using the Text Editors

The text editors can also open and edit the text file. There are different text editors, such as “nano” and “vim”, but we will use the nano text editor as it comes pre-installed on most Linux distributions. The syntax of this command to open the text file is described below:

For example, we will open our text file using the nano text editor:

Interestingly, you can view as well as edit the content of the file.

Note: To learn about the “vim‘ editor, click here to read our detailed article on “vim” commands.

Method 6: Using the less Command

We can also use the “less” command utility, which opens the text file by displaying its one page at a time and the general syntax of using the less command:

For example, we will open the “MyFile.txt” using the less command utility:

After one page’s content, you must press the “Enter” key to view more content.

Moreover, you can exit the output by pressing the “q” key on the keyboard.

Alternate Methods

The methods listed in this section are also used to open up a text file with limited content. The “head” and “tail” command utilities are used to display only the first ten lines and the last ten lines, respectively.

tail Command

The “tail” command can also be used to serve the above-said purpose using the syntax provided below:

To understand the usage of the tail command, we will open the “MyFile.txt” using the command:

The contents of the file have been displayed.

head Command

The “head” utility can be used following the below-stated syntax:

Following the above syntax of the head command, we will open the “MyFile.txt” using the command:

The file has been opened in the terminal.

That’s all about this tutorial!

Conclusion

To open a text file in a Linux terminal, we can use the “cat”, “more”, “less”, “nl”, and “xdg-open” commands with different text editors. Moreover, the “head” and “tail” commands can also open a file with limited content. This method is super beneficial to get the content on the terminal. However, if you open it via text editors, you can edit the content as well. This blog has briefly explained all the possible methods to open a text file in Linux.

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