# Chapter 12. Showing What's in a File

#### Contents:

Cracking the Nut
What Good Is a cat?
"less" is More
Show Nonprinting Characters with cat -v or od -c
What's in That Whitespace?
Finding File Types
Squash Extra Blank Lines
How to Look at the End of a File: tail
Finer Control on tail
How to Look at Files as They Grow
GNU tail File Following
Printing the Top of a File
Numbering Lines

## 12.1. Cracking the Nut

> #### Summary Box This chapter talks about the many ways of dumping a file to the screen. Most users know the brute force approach provided by cat (Section 12.2), but there's more to it than that: Pagers such as more and less (Section 12.3) that give you more control when looking through long files. Finding out what type of data a file contains before opening it (Section 12.6). Looking at just the beginning or end of a file (Section 12.8 through Section 12.12). Numbering lines (Section 12.13). -- TOR

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