How to Use ‘cat’ and ‘tac’ Commands with Examples in Linux

This article is a part of our Linux Tricks and Tips series, in this article we will cover some basic usage of cat command (most frequently used command in Linux) and tac (reverse of cat command – print files in reverse order) with some practical examples.

Read Also: 13 Useful ‘cat’ Command Examples in Linux

Basic Usage of Cat Command in Linux

Cat command, acronym for Concatenate, is one of the most used commands in *nix systems. The most basic usage of the command is to read files and display them to stdout, meaning to display the content of files on your terminal.

# cat file.txt

View Content of File in Linux

Another usage of the cat command is to read or combine multiple files together and send the output to a monitor as illustrated in the below examples.

# cat file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

View Content of Multiple Files

The command can also be used to concatenate (join) multiple files into one single file using the “>” Linux redirection operator.

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