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3.3.7 Looking at files

      The commands more and cat are used for viewing the contents of files. more displays a file, one screenful at a time, while cat displays the whole file at once.

To look at the file shells, we can use the command

/home/larry/foo# more shells

In case you're interested what shells contains, it's a list of valid shell programs on your system. On most systems, this includes /bin/sh, /bin/bash, and /bin/csh. We'll talk about these different types of shells later.

While using more, press to display the next page of text, and to display the previous page. There are other commands available in more as well, these are just the basics. Pressing will quit more.

Quit more and try cat /etc/termcap. The text will probably fly by much too quickly for you to read it. The name ``cat'' actually stands for ``concatenate'', which is the real use of the program. The cat command can be used to concatenate the contents of several files and save the result to another file. This will be discussed later.



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Matt Welsh
mdw@sunsite.unc.edu