Viewing and joining text

The commands that print files to the screen, show parts of them, and combine or split text by line and by column.

Print files to standard output, and concatenate several files into one stream.

Print files with their lines in reverse order — last line first.

Print the first lines or bytes of a file.

Print the last lines of a file — and keep printing as the file grows.

View a file one screen at a time, pausing between screens.

Print files with their lines numbered, with control over which lines are counted and how the number is formatted.

Pull selected columns — byte ranges or delimited fields — out of each line of input.

Join files side by side, line for line.

Join two files on a shared field, pairing lines that have the same key.

Compare two sorted files line by line and report which lines they share.

Break a file into equal-sized pieces, each written to its own output file.

Break a file into pieces at lines chosen by line number or by a matching pattern.

Dump the raw bytes of a file in octal, hexadecimal, decimal, floating-point, or character form — a low-level view of exactly what a file contains.