I’ve already shown you how to view files with the cat command. In today’s post I’m going to show you how to use the GNU cat command for its originally intended purpose: for joining multiple files together.

There are many ways to view files in GNU/Linux. One of the simplest command line tools for viewing files is cat. The cat command, short for concatenate, is actually intended for joining multiple files into one, but it works equally well for viewing text files.

Locating files that you know exist, but you can’t remember where they are can be frustrating. There are a handful of GUI-based search tools for Linux and Unix, but if you prefer to work in the command line, or don’t have one of these special apps installed, you can often fall back on command line tool locate.

Many Linux users use the ‘find’ utility when searching for files using the command line on their system. There are times though where I’m just looking for something and I don’t want to have to wait for the command to scan the entire directory tree in order to track it down. That’s where locate comes in with quick and simple results.

Suppose you’ve been good (or sort of good anyway), and you have a huge stack of CD-ROMs (or DVDs) with backups and archives of your old files. Great. But how can you find anything? I solved this problem today by making an index of all the files stored on these disks using a few simple GNU command line tools.

One of the things I like about Linux is the command line. I have used nautilus, konqueror, and thunar to manage files in Linux and these file managers are great for what they do. But there are times when one simply wants to find a file when working on the command line without having to open a GUI application.

One of the things I like about Linux is the command line. I have used nautilus, gnome-commander, konqueror, kommander, dolphin and thunar to manage files in Linux and these file managers are great for what they do. But there are times when one simply wants to find a file when working on the command line without having to open a GUI application.

GNU find is a powerful command-line utility that lets you search for files and folders in a hierarchical tree directory structure. It is the backend for all those utilities out there like the graphical searching in KDE or GNOME. However, find can be a little hard to handle at first by beginners.

There is always a time when working with the CLI that you will want to find a set of files by name, such as all JPEG images. The `find` command lets you do this and more. Let’s jump into the basic structure of a find command: