File Readers (Demo)
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Course
Difficulty
Intermediate
Video Transcription
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>> Hey Cyberians. Welcome back to
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the Linux plus course here at Cybrary.
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I'm your instructor Rob Gels.
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In today's lesson, we're going to discuss file readers.
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Upon completion of today's lesson,
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you're going to understand the commands and
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utilities that we could use in Linux to read a file.
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We're going to work with some of
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these tools such as grep,
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cat, tail, head, less and more.
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Brief terminology talk here.
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Grep is actually short for
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the GNU regular expression parser.
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It's used to search for text in a file and it returns
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any lines that contain
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that string of texts that you're searching for.
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The cat command is short for concatenate.
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The actual purpose of this command
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is to combine files together,
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but generally we just use it as a shorthand to say,
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hey, cat out this file
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and print it's output to the screen.
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In other words, print it to standard out.
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Now the tail command reads the end
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of a file where head reads
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the beginning of a file and less
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and more are examples of something called a pager.
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A pager reads one page at a time and
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less came after more so the joke is that less is more.
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Now let's see all of these commands in
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action with some demo time.
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Here we are in our demo environment
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and the first thing we're going to start out with grep.
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Grep is just a great tool
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that you're going to use all the time.
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In fact, I used it previously in
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the course when we were working with users and groups.
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Grep is helpful whenever you need to
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find a string in characters in the file.
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It just reads the file and returns lines that
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are in there that contains
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the string that you're searching for.
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If you are grabbing for string to
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search and then you type in file to search.
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What it'll do is it will return
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the content of this file
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with a string that you're searching for.
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For example, let me
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go back to the beginning of the line here.
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I'm going to clear this out and Control
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K. That just deletes the end of the line.
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I'm going to do a grep for test in Etsy password.
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It's going to return any lines that
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contain the word test.
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We can see it returns test and it returns
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the information about the test user on the system.
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I can do the same thing for me and there we go.
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We can see all the currencies for root.
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But here notice that there's a
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>> root user and there's also
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>> an operator that has a root directory.
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It returns more than one occurrence.
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If there's more than one occurrence in a file,
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it just searches for the string.
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We're going to cover grep in
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a lot more detail later so stay tuned for that.
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Let's move on to the cat command.
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As I said, the cat command is
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>> generally best used just to
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>> printout the shortest file you can find to the screen.
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You don't want to print out long file.
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For instance, we're going to print out cat,
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Etsy host and that's all good.
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But if we were trying do, let's say var log messages.
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Sudo cat var log messages.
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That's going to fill up our whole dang screen.
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There are much better commands to use
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that and pagers are
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things that you could use to use that,
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they are much more efficient.
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But the actual purpose of the cat command that I spoke
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about earlier is to combine two files together.
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Let's go to my home directory.
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I have a couple of files that we can look at here.
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You have cat, let's take a look at file 1 and file 2.
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This is file 1. This is from file.
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If we type in cat file 1 space file 2,
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it combines the two of those file together.
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Just put stat output together into the screen to
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standard out or we can redirect it
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to a file which we'll talk about later.
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An example of using cat ness way would be to
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create a certificate chain with engine X that
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combines a signed cert in an intermediate cert into
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one file and that's used for SSL or TLS certificates.
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That's way beyond the scope of this course,
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but that's just a good real-world example
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of when you would use cat in this way.
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Cat has some cool options.
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We could do cat-n on Etsy password for instance.
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This is going to display all the line numbers on
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the left-hand side so you can
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see each and every line number.
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If you say, hey dude, I think there's something
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wrong with Etsy password.
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Can you look at line 13 on
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the nobody line and tell me if that looks right to you.
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That's a really good use for that.
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You could also do cat-a and you can see hidden files.
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Let me clear the screen and I'll just run
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this on file 1 in my home directory.
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What we can see at the end of
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the old files is this dollar sign.
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What is that about? Well, if you get rid of
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a we see no dollar sign.
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What this does, this shows all hidden characters.
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End of line, tab,
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and control characters in Linux.
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That dollar sign indicates the end
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>> of the line character.
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>> This is good if you're working with
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files that came from a different operating system
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because sometimes they don't have
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>> the same characters for
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>> things like tabs and control characters
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underline and can cause problems.
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If think there's something weird
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with the file is not quite
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working properly with commands
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and links you are trying to run on it,
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check it out with cat-a and make sure it
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has the proper characters in place.
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Now let's move on to our head and tail commands.
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These are just neat and pretty easy to use.
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Basically head, you just run
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head and then the file name that you want to look at.
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That will give you the first 10 lines whereas
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the tail command will give you
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the last 10 lines of any file.
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But both commands actually can use the option dash n,
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display a number of lines specified.
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You do it head-n of 15 on
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Etsy password and then it'll display
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the first 15 lines of Etsy password.
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>> Or we could do tail.
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>> We could do tail 20 Etsy password
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and it'll split the last 20 lines.
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But you might be saying, wait Rob,
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where's the dash n option?
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Well, here's the cool thing about head and tail.
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It will take n as input a number.
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You just give it a dash number and it knows that,
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that just means read that number of lines.
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You don't actually have to specify the n option,
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but you can do it as well.
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A tail come in has
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one other really interesting option that
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I frequently use and that's the follow command.
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For instance, if we wanted to follow
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the output of a file is going in real-time,
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we could do tail-f on var log messages.
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We'll do this with sudo so it doesn't give us problems.
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What we can see here hopefully is that
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any things that get written,
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you could see that it updates.
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It updates in real time
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anything that is getting into the file.
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This is really helpful if you're trying to track
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down a brute force attack happening on your system,
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trying to see what's going on.
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Maybe taking a look at if you're adding a kernel to
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the system and you want to watch
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the message in real time.
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This is all good reasons that you might use to
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tail-f option to follow the file in real-time.
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But we'll hit "Control C" and get out of that.
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Let's move onto our pager commands.
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Now I'm actually not going to show you the more pager
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because the less pager is better than more.
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Less has more capabilities than more.
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The joke is that less is more.
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These are known as pagers.
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They display page output one file at a time,
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one page at a time rather and the less command
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is used instead of the more command
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because it's more feature-rich.
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You can move backwards with less whereas with more
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you can only move forward in
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a line and you can move one page at a time.
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Also with less you can search using
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the forward slash and the question mark characters.
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Let's see this in action. Let's go and do
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less Etsy password and
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then we can just see all the output of this.
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This isn't a very big file,
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so I can go down by hitting
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page down but it doesn't really do anything.
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This is not a large file. Or you can go back up.
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Let's do less on our var log messages again,
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that example that we had.
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Earlier were like, wow, this thing is huge.
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This one we need to be sudo force while we need to
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have root access essentially to see it.
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We can run that and then we can use the page
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down commands to move down the page.
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Or we can use the page up commands to
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move up one page at a time.
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There are also some cool shortcuts unless you can
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use capital G to move to the very bottom of the file.
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Or you can use double g,
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lowercase to move to the very top of the file.
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Let me get out of this.
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The way to exit less is by hitting Q on your keyboard.
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Q is for quit and let me go back into
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Etsy password that we were looking at
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before because I want to
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>> show you how you search in here.
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>> If you're trying to search forward in less you hit
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the forward slash button
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and it type what you're searching for.
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I'll just try and find myself in this file.
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Then when I hit Enter we'll see
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that it actually highlights my name.
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Now, let's move backwards.
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Let's search in reverse.
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We can search backwards by using
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the question mark character and then just
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typing what we're trying to search for.
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I'm going to search for root and we'll see
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that it returns this operator we saw before.
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If I hit lowercase n,
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it's going to display the next place
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that it finds the search value
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>> that I'm looking for root.
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>> Then I can hit N again and it tells me
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the pattern is not found which means that those
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are the only two places that is in
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this file is the only lines where the word root occurs.
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We can also hit dash and capital
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N and then hit "Enter"
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and it will display the line numbers.
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This is just like what we saw when we ran cat-n,
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is that this is how you display
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>> the line numbers in less.
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>> Then again with less, you can just hit
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quit by hitting Q to get out of the file.
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In this lesson, we covered reading
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files using the utilities grep,
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cat, tail, head,
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less, but not more because less is more.
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Thanks so much for being here and I look
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forward to seeing you in our next lesson.
Up Next
Redirection Part 1
Redirection Part 2
Text Processing (Demo)
Advanced Text Processing Part 1
Advanced Text Processing Part 2
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