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

• 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]