7. cat

We’re almost done navigating files, but first let’s learn how to read a file. A simple command to use is the cat command, short for concatenate, it not only displays file contents but it can combine multiple files and show you the output of them.

$ cat dogfile birdfile

It’s not great for viewing large files and it’s only meant for short content. There are many other tools that we use to view larger text files that we’ll discuss in the next lesson.