>cat, head, tail, wc Examples

cat, head, tail, wc Examples

cat - concatenate files and print on the standard output

cat [OPTION]... [FILE]...

-n:  number all output lines
-s:  suppress repeated empty output lines
-T:  display TAB characters as ^I

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head - output the first part of files

head [OPTION]... [FILE]...

-n <num>: print the first <num> lines instead of the first 10; with the leading '-', print all but the last <num> lines of each file

-c <num>: print the first <num> bytes of each file; with the leading '-',  print  all  but the last <num> bytes of each file

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tail - output the last part of files

tail [OPTION]... [FILE]...

-n <num>: output  the last <num> lines, instead of the last 10; or use -n +<num> to output starting with line <num>

-f: output appended data as the file grows

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wc - print newline, word, and byte counts for each file

wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...

-c: print the byte counts
-m: print the character counts
-l: print the newline counts
-L: print the maximum display width
-w: print the word counts

for further information see the manual pages cat(1), less(1), head(1), tail(1), wc(1)

concatenate the entries in the two input files and write result to the file french-and-german-cities.csv
cat ../data/city-D.csv ../data/city-F.csv > french-and-german-cities.csv
[Output]
concatenate the entries from the multiple input files (wildcard expansion) and write the result in the file all-cities.csv
cat ../data/city-*.csv > all-cities.csv
[Output]
output all spanish cities and number all output lines
cat -n ../data/city-E.csv
[Output]
return the first line (header line) from the file
head -n1 ../data/BCHI-dataset_2019-03-04.txt
[Output]
return the first 4 lines from the file
head -n4 ../data/city.sample.csv
[Output]
print content from line 850 to 859
head -n859 ../data/moby-dick.txt | tail
[Output]
return the last 10 lines from the file
tail ../data/city.sample.csv
[Output]
View content of file, starting from line 2 (omit header line)
tail -n +2 ../data/BCHI-dataset_2019-03-04.txt
[Output]
what's this command doing? Check it out and read the manual page
seq 1 10 | head -n -4
[Output]
start less pager programm (interactive) and preceed every line with its line number
less -N ../data/city.sample.csv
[Output]
print newline, word, and byte counts for each file
wc ../data/city.sample.csv
[Output]
print number of lines in city.sample.csv (the number of cities)
wc -l ../data/city.sample.csv
[Output]
print number of lines for each file matching city-*.csv
wc -l ../data/city-*.csv
[Output]

all examples assembled by andreas schmidt for the IC3K 2022 conference