Concatenate and print (display) the content of files.
The cat command can be piped into grep to find specific words in the file:
cat file.txt grep keyword output.txt
However all modern versions of grep have this built-in. Running a single command/process is more efficient, and so with large files will be noticably faster:
grepkeyword file.txt output.txt
This is not a final itch page - just trying to get something up so I can upload the project tonight!:D. On mac OS the goose has sezsherz sum time and wont do anything and i have to restart the app. BattleCAT65 19 days ago. Well attest that's for me don't know if it will be the same for you.
grep can also display an entire file, (like cat), by using the grep keyword '.' which will match lines with at least 1 character. Alternatively the grep keyword '^' will match the beginning of every line including blank lines.
When grep is used to display multiple files, it will prepend each line of output with the filename:
$ grep . *.txt
Examples:
Display a file:
$ cat myfile.txt
Display all .txt files:
$ cat *.txt
Concatenate two files:
$ cat File1.txt File2.txt > union.txt
If you need to combine two files but also eliminate duplicates, this can be done with sort unique:
$ sort -u File1.txt File2.txt > unique_union.txt
Put the contents of a file into a variable
$ my_variable=`cat File3.txt`
“To be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting” ~ E. E. Cummings
Related macOS commands:
cp - Copy one or more files to another location.
mv - Move or rename files or directories.
hexdump - View binary file.
tail - Output the last part of files.
textutil - Manipulate text files in various formats.
vis - Display non-printable characters in a visual format.
Stupid Cat tricks - by Mike Chirico.