How do I open a text file in my terminal?

Question

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 ?

score 248 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 27 '13 at 12:59

248

For short files:

cat <path/your_file>

directly shows a text file in the terminal.

For longer files:

less <path/your_file>

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

e.g.

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

edited Feb 27 '13 at 12:59

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

61,858

answered Feb 27 '13 at 12:18

Thomas15v

1,633

don.joey · Answer 2 · 2013-02-27T12:50:42.573

Another alternative is vim.

vim RESULTS.txt

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.

Check the community help wiki: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VimHowto

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.

score 20 · Answer 3 · edited Feb 28 '13 at 15:59

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

head -n -1 filename.txt

and

head -n -0 filename.txt

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

head filename.txt

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

head -n 20 filename.txt

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

head -n -0 filename.txt

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

score 15 · Answer 4 · edited Feb 28 '13 at 06:11

15

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

less RESULTS.txt

so that you can navigate through it with directional keys.

edited Feb 28 '13 at 06:11

Eliah Kagan

119,640

answered Feb 27 '13 at 12:21

tvuillemin

183

score 14 · Answer 5 · edited Feb 27 '13 at 14:19

14

Another option is:

tail -n 30 result.txt

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

edited Feb 27 '13 at 14:19

0xC0000022L

5,870

answered Feb 27 '13 at 14:12

Jool

174

score 9 · Answer 6 · edited Feb 28 '13 at 02:31

9

Another option:

tail -f your_file

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.

edited Feb 28 '13 at 02:31

answered Feb 27 '13 at 18:03

Luc M

149

score 7 · Answer 7 · edited Feb 28 '13 at 02:04

7

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..

edited Feb 28 '13 at 02:04

Eric Carvalho

55,453

answered Feb 28 '13 at 01:36

kainlite

111

score 4 · Answer 8 · answered Feb 27 '13 at 12:17

4

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

answered Feb 27 '13 at 12:17

prophecy201

2,760
17
22

score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Feb 27 '13 at 21:28

The shell programm sed also has an option to print out the contents of a file.

sed -n p RESULTS.txt

So sed walks through every line and prints it to the terminal. But sed also has editing capabilities. For instance if you want to replace each comma with a dot you can write:

sed 's/,/./g' RESULTS.txt

score 2 · Answer 10 · 2013-02-28T00:22:35.480

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.

score 1 · Answer 11 · answered Aug 16 '18 at 05:39

Why not.

You can also use

most RESULTS.txt

It's almost the same as less, but it also supports horizontal scrolling if the file contains long lines - which is really handy.

most is not installed by default, so to use it, you have to first

sudo apt install most

score 1 · Answer 12 · edited Feb 28 '13 at 02:40

1

If you just want to read the file content, go in the file directory and type

less RESULTS.txt

If you want to read and edit the text file, from the same directory type

nano RESULTS.txt

The -w switch in the nano command can be inserted before the file name to prevent wrapping of long lines.

edited Feb 28 '13 at 02:40

Janus Troelsen

2,776

answered Feb 27 '13 at 14:31

DocKuro

111

Gary S. Weaver · Answer 13 · 2013-02-27T18:44:46.780

Lots of good options provided here already, but another option if you need to edit is emacs:

emacs -nw RESULTS.txt

might not need the -nw, depending. You may also have to apt-get install emacs23 or apt-get install emacs24, or if you don't have X or don't want related X dependencies, apt-get install emacs23-nox or apt-get install emacs24-nox.

And in addition to cat and less as mentioned elsewhere, there is more. More is less, because you see a page at a time and can't scroll via the command itself, but you can scroll with the terminal window, if you have a scrolling terminal window:

more RESULTS.txt

If you're in bash, you have something similar to cat by doing:

while IFS= read a;do echo "$a";done<RESULTS.txt

score 1 · Answer 14 · answered Feb 27 '13 at 18:42

1

If you need to edit the content of the file i commonly use nano.

nano filename

answered Feb 27 '13 at 18:42

Jaison Brooks

109

score 1 · Answer 15 · answered Feb 27 '13 at 21:25

1

Another more exotic answer is to use grep:

grep . RESULTS.txt

The grep command searches for a every character in the file and prints it out. So basically the complete file is printed out.

answered Feb 27 '13 at 21:25

qbi

19,515

score -1 · Answer 16 · answered Feb 27 '13 at 21:12

-1

or just

vi YourFile

use hjkl buttons to move line left/down/up/right, Esc then :q to quit

and you can PageUp/PageDown

you can also edit it here in a stright way

here you'll find more link

answered Feb 27 '13 at 21:12

4pie0

481
8
21

How do I open a text file in my terminal?

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