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Linux File Viewing Series
2026-04-01 15:45 UTC by baeldung

Linux offers a rich set of tools for reading, inspecting, and displaying file content from the command line. Whether you’re paging through a large log file, searching for patterns with grep, or navigating a file in vim, the shell gives you precise control over how content is viewed.

This guide covers the essential techniques for viewing files in Linux: from core pagers and readers to text searching, Vi/Vim navigation, file comparison, and tools for opening specialized formats like EPUB, PDF, HEIC, and CAD files.

Viewing and Reading File Content

• Viewing Files in Linux Using cat, more, and less
• Differences Between more, less, and most in Linux
• Display the First “n” Characters of a File in Linux
• Printing Specified Lines From a File
• How to Read the First and the Last Line From Input
• Adding Syntax Highlighting for the less Command
• Using the tail Command with Colored Output

Searching and Filtering Text

• Difference Between CR LF, LF, and CR Line Break Types
• grep – How to Output Only the Content of a Capturing Group
• How to Find File Encoding in Linux
• Limiting the Output of grep
• Show Only the N-th Line After the Match
• Using grep After a Specified Line Number

Navigating and Viewing in Vi and Vim

• Basic Vi Navigation and Scroll
• Basic and Advanced Searching in Vi
• Character Navigation or How to Jump to a Specific Character in Vi
• Displaying the Full Path of the Current File in Vim
• How to Clear Word Highlighting in Vim
• How to Make Vim Remember the Last Edit Position
• Working With Vim Windows

Comparing and Inspecting Files

• How to View the Contents of tar.gz Without Extracting It
• How To Compare Two Directories on Linux
• How to Test tar File Integrity
• Comparing Two Files in Linux
• Comparing tar Files in Linux
• How to Color the Output of diff
• Displaying Files Side by Side in Linux

Viewing Specialized File Formats

• View Images from the Terminal in Linux
• EPUB Viewer Tools in Linux
• Linux Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Tools
• How to Open .dwg Format in Ubuntu
• How to View .HEIC Photos on Linux
• Opening .dmg Files on a Linux System
• How to Check PDF Metadata in the Linux Terminal
• How to View a .msg File in Linux

The post Linux File Viewing Series first appeared on Baeldung on Linux.

      

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