Windows: Display File Contents

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From the course by Google

Operating Systems and You: Becoming a Power User

1415 ratings

Google

Operating Systems and You: Becoming a Power User

1415 ratings

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Google IT Support Professional Certificate

In this course, you’ll learn how to use the major operating systems, Windows and Linux, which are a core component of IT. Through a combination of video lectures, demonstrations, and hands-on practice, you’ll learn about the main components of an operating system and how to perform critical tasks like managing software and users, and configuring hardware. By the end of this course you’ll be able to: - navigate the Windows and Linux filesystems using a graphical user interface and command line interpreter. - set up users, groups, and permissions for account access. - install, configure, and remove software on the Windows and Linux operating systems. - configure disk partitions and filesystems. - understand how system processes work and how to manage them. - work with system logs and remote connection tools. - utilize operating system knowledge to troubleshoot common issues in an IT Support Specialist role. Except as otherwise noted, the contents on this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

From the lesson

Navigating the System

Welcome to the Operating Systems course of the IT Support Professional Certificate! In the first week of this course, we will cover the basics of Windows and Linux operating systems (OS). We will learn about how directories and files work in Windows and Linux OS. You will also learn practical ways to manipulate files and directories in the Windows graphical user interface (GUI), Windows command line interface (CLI), and Linux shell. By the end of this module, you will interact with files and directories and perform basic text manipulation in Windows and Linux OS.

Windows: Display File Contents3:53

Linux: Display File Contents2:24

Windows: Modifying Text Files2:04

Linux: Modifying Text Files1:53

Windows Powershell3:09

Windows: Searching within Files6:15

Windows: Searching within Directories1:01

Linux: Searching within Files1:02

Windows: Input, Output, and the Pipeline7:02

Linux: Input, Output and Pipeline3:41

Windows and Linux Advanced Navigation1:40

Ben First Tech Job1:13

Meet the Instructors

Google

Now that we've learned the basics of file and directory navigation,

let's learn how we can display and edit files,

search for text within files and more.

In the Windows GUI, if we want to open a file and view its contents,

we can just double click on the file.

Depending on the file type,

it will open on a default application.

In Windows, text files default to open in an application called notepad.

But we can change this if we want to.

To change the default application that opens files,

just right click and click Properties.

Under 'Open with', we can change the application to another text editor, like Word Pad.

Most of the files that we'll be dealing with throughout this course,

will be text and configuration files.

So, let's just focus on those files instead of images, music files, etc.

Viewing the contents of a file in PowerShell is simply using the 'cat' command,

which stands for concatenate. Let's give it a try.

This will dump the contents of the file into our shell.

This isn't the best solution for a file since it just

keeps writing the content until the whole file is displayed.

If we want to view the contents of the file one page at a time,

we can use the 'more' command, like this.

The 'more' command will get the contents of the file but

will pause once it fills the terminal window.

Now, we can advance the text at our own pace.

When we run the 'more' command,

were launched into a separate program from the shell.

This means that we interact with the more program with different keys.

The Enter key advances the file by one line.

You can use this if you want to move slowly through the file.

Space advances the file by one page.

A page in this case depends on the size of your terminal window.

Basically, 'more' will output enough content to fill the terminal window.

The q key allows you to quit out of 'more' and go back to your shell.

If we want to leave the 'more' command and go back to our shell,

we can just hit the q key.

Here we are.

Now, what if we just wanted to view part of the file?

Let's say we want to quickly see what the first few lines of the text file are.

We don't really want to open up the whole file.

Instead, we just want to get a glimpse of what the document is.

This is called the head of the file.

To do this, we can go back to 'cat' and add the -Head parameter.

This will show us the first 10 lines of the file.

Now, what if we wanted to view the last few lines or the tail of the file?

I bet you can guess what you are going to do.

This will show us, by default,

the last ten lines of the file.

Again, these two commands don't seem like they have any immediate use to you yet.

We'll see their benefits when we work with logs in an upcoming lesson.

Now, let's take a look at how to do these same tasks in Linux.

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