Shell Programming and Scripting

Dear Experts,

Would like to know if there's a way if we can read a large file(like 1-2GB) using a shell command or a script and that can show the output as well of the contents of the file in the CLI?
Will appreciate your response. Thank you

There are hundreds of ways to read a text file in a shell. The definition of a text file varies from operating system to operating system. The ways to read a text file vary from shell to shell.

What operating system are you using?

What shell are you using?

Is the file you want to read a text file? If it contains binary data or one or more lines containing more than LINE_MAX bytes, your options for reading the file and displaying its contents in a readable form will be much more limited.

Of course, you could write your own CLI in C or C++ and make it read any type of file and print it in whatever format you desire.

The file is text file containing texts separated by new lines but only thing is file size is around more than a GIG, the OS is Red hat linux and shell is Bash, please do let us know how to approach on this?

If you want to display it on your screen with a new line from the file being displayed every second, try something like:

Code:

while read -r line
do	printf '%s\n' "$line"
	sleep 1
done < filename

If you're a very fast reader with nimble fingers and you want to print the file to your terminal as quickly as possible stopping once-in-a-while when you see something interesting going by, use:

Code:

cat filename

and while it is printing use ctl-s (i.e. hit the control key and the s key at the same time) to temporarily stop the output and ctl-q to restart the output.

If you want to display the output a page at a time, use:

Code:

less filename

or:

Code:

more filename

If you want to skip around in the file searching for certain patterns and you're used to vi editing commands, use:

Code:

view filename

(note that view is a link to vi that opens its file operands read-only instead of read-write).

If you're looking for certain patterns in your file and only want to see lines that contain that pattern, use grep.

If you're trying to do something else, use or write a utility, that does what you want... ... ...

Appreciate and thanks very much Don, let me try those suggestions.

Could you please explicate what would be meant by