bash$ cat /usr/share/dict/linux.words
I would put the results, but that would require quite a few lines. Well, head is next:
bash$ head /usr/share/dict/linux.words Aarhus Aaron Ababa aback abaft abandon abandoned abandoning abandonment abandons
This one was not as long as the last one. The head command prints the first 10 lines of the file to the screen by default. If you only wanted the first three lines you could type this:
bash$ head -n 3 /usr/share/dict/linux.words Aarhus Aaron Ababa
You can also do the same with tail for the end of the file:
bash$ tail /usr/share/dict/linux.words zoologically zoom zooms zoos Zorn Zoroaster Zoroastrian Zulu Zulus Zurich
Like head with tail you can say the number of lines you would like to display:
bash$ tail -n 3 /usr/share/dict/linux.words Zulu Zulus Zurich
This is good when you would like to look at a log file or something else that is long, but you only want to see the last few lines of the file. The commands more and less are very similar. You start more the same way as cat, head, and tail:
bash$ more /usr/share/dict/linux.words
This will display one screen of text at a time. With more you can press the spacebar to scroll down a screen at a time and the Enter key to go down a line at a time. The biggest problem with more is that you cannot scroll back up. This is where less is very strong:
bash$ less /usr/share/dict/linux.words
This will also display a screen of text at a time. The up and down arrows go up and down a line at a time. You can also press Page Up and Page Down to scroll a page at a time. With both more and less you can press q to quit early. Output of programs can be piped into these programs also. This is how you would pipe the output of the ls command into less:
bash$ ls /dev/ | less
This would of course put a lot of text on the screen so we will not put it here. With these commands you can see many text files better then you would have been able to before.