Displaying and Creating Files

Unix provides a very basic mechanism to display and create files using the cat command. Usually a user will use an editor to create and edit files and a viewer like less to view files. But cat is always available.

A file can be created by typing the following (assuming we are still in our programs directory):

$cat > e
This will be the content of
our new file!
$ls -F
e  f*
$

The greater symbol signifies that cat will put its output into the file 'e'. If we reverse the greater sign the content of the file is displayed on the screen:

$cat < e
This will be the content of
our new file!
$

If we do not use any of the two symbols with cat, it will simply display the content of the file:

$cat e
This will be the content of
our new file!
$