Viewing files from various angles – head, tail, less, and more

As of this very moment, your system likely has many text files of various sizes including a never ending log file being written too. You might even have several large files containing copious amounts of code (such as the Linux kernel or a software project) and would like to quickly view them from the console without slowing your system down to a halt.

To do this, there are four essential commands that should be able to provide you more than enough functionality for their purposes:

• Head: Can be used to output the beginning lines of a file
• Tail: Can be used to output the end or tail of a file (continuously as well)
• More: A tool used as a pager to view large files page by page/line by line
• Less: Is the same as more, but it has more features, including backwards scrolling