A UNIX utility for concatenating files or input streams together. Do not use for questions about the animal.
Questions tagged [cat]
148 questions
426
votes
4 answers
What is the Windows equivalent of the Unix command cat?
I want to do exactly what unix "cat" does, but on my PC. Is there a simple equivalent command for the Windows command line?
Specifically I want to create a file from all the files of a given type in a folder
In Unix:
cat *fna…
Kirt
- 7,561
58
votes
5 answers
Unix cat starting from line
What is the best way to output from a file starting from a specific line (big number like 70000). Something like:
cat --line=70000
vonhogen
- 2,459
53
votes
8 answers
What is the general consensus on "Useless use of cat"?
When I pipe multiple unix commands such as grep, sed, tr etc. I tend to specify the input file that is being processed using cat. So something like cat file | grep ... | awk ... | sed ... .
But recently after a couple of comments left on my answers…
arunkumar
- 643
42
votes
2 answers
Why can I cat /dev?
I can cat /dev, I can ls /dev, I can't less /dev. Why does cat let me cat this directory but no other directories?
haboutnnah
- 541
41
votes
4 answers
Change Behavior of Linux Power Button
I have a headless linux mint machine that I use for a file server and other things. It's been working great for me for a few years, but there's one issue - my cat likes to hang out on top of it, and when she climbs off and on she occasionally steps…
schizodactyl
- 513
41
votes
1 answer
Why is cat not changing the access time?
Calling cat a second time on a file doesn't update its access time. I was expecting the access time to be updated every time a file's contents get displayed.
I see the same behaviour if I open the file in a web browser. Its access time does not get…
nelaaro
- 14,139
- 30
- 88
- 115
34
votes
4 answers
Using -replace on pipes in powershell
I want to test out a replace before I use it, so I'm trying to write a quick online command to see what the output is. However, I'm not sure what the syntax is. What I want to do is something like
cat file | -replace "a", "b"
What is the correct…
31
votes
18 answers
List only the device names of all available network interfaces
I want to get a list of all available Network-Device Names on my Linux server. I figured that
ifconfig
would do the job, however ifconfig produces quite much output:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet Hardware Adresse 08:00:27:fc:5c:98
inet…
ftiaronsem
- 593
26
votes
4 answers
Why does this not work? "ls *.txt | xargs cat > all.txt" (all files into single txt document)
Why does this not work?
ls *.txt | xargs cat > all.txt
(I want to join the contents of all text files into a single 'all.txt' file.)
find with -exec should also work, but I would really like to understand the xargs syntax.
Thanks
ajo
- 945
- 2
- 12
- 20
24
votes
4 answers
Are there any options to let cat output with color?
If I want to output a C source code file with syntax highlighting, can I use cat?
Jichao
- 7,940
22
votes
2 answers
pipe and stdin redirection to cat
Why does
echo "hello world" | cat
works while
cat < echo "hello world"
does not? My (incorrect) intuition is that pipe would redirect stdout to cat as stdin.
21
votes
7 answers
how to copy entire linux root filesystem to new hard drive on with ssh and tar
I need to transfer an entire linux root filesystem off of a failing hard drive onto another computer with an open, available partition. I've pretty sure this involves tar and ssh, but I can't remember exactly how to do this.
I'm imaging probably…
CHK
- 607
21
votes
7 answers
Cat file to terminal at particular speed of lines per second
I'm lazy and I could write a script to do this, but I'm even too lazy to think of how to do it.
I often do things like :
cris$ python runexperiment.py > output.txt
cris$ cat output.txt
Sometimes when looking at the long output of an experiment I…
20
votes
7 answers
Cat command and echo
I'd like to concatenate the output from echo with content of a file. I've tried the following comand:
echo "abc" | cat 1.txt > 2.txt
but the 2.txt file only contains the content from 1.txt. Why doesn't it work?
Ringger81
- 1,397
- 3
- 13
- 28
18
votes
2 answers
lossless concatenation of ogg vorbis files
I have a couple of ogg vorbis files, all encoded with the exact same properties that I want to concatenate into a single file.
I know that the ogg vorbis format supports plain concatenation of multiple files like:
$ cat file1.ogg file2.ogg >…
josch
- 988