Cat command on Linux (concatenate files) [Basic Guide]

2 years ago
Uirá Endy Ribeiro
2 minutes

The cat command in Linux concatenates files, prints their screen content, and can even receive text typed via the keyboard for a file.

The most common cat options are:

Let’s see how to create a file with just a few lines of text:

$cat > teste.txt

You can now type any text. When finished, press Ctrl d on an empty line to finish entering data and save the teste.txt file.

To view the content of the newly created file:

$ cat teste.txt

Cat can also be used to concatenate files.

$ cat texto1.txt > texto.txt

Note that in this example the contents of the texto.txt file are replaced with texto1.txt.

To add the content of the texto1.txt to the end of the texto.txt file the correct one would be:

$ cat texto1.txt >> texto.txt

Shows the content of a source code file with numbered lines:

$ cat -n teste.c 
1 #include 
2int main () 
3 {
4 printf (“Linux certification!  n”);

5};

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Uirá Endy Ribeiro

Uirá Endy Ribeiro is a Software Developer and Cloud Computing Architect with a 23-year career. He has master's degrees in computer science and fifteen IT certifications and is the author of 11 books recognized in the IT world market. He is also Director at Universidade Salgado de Oliveira and Director of the Linux Professional Institute - LPI Director's Board.

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