4.2.9. cat — display contents of files or combine them

With the cat command, you can view the contents of a file on the screen or combine contents of multiple files.

View contents of a file

To view the contents of a file, use cat, followed by the name of the file:

cat /usr/share/dict/words

A
A's
AMD
AMD's
AOL
AOL's
AWS
AWS's
Aachen
...

This will display the entire contents of the file.

Combine contents of files

If you include multiple file names in cat, it will combine them and print their contents on the screen.

If you would like to save the output to a file instead, use the following format:

cat file1.txt file2.txt > files.txt

The > operator redirects standard output to the file name following it.